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Comment by sh1mmer | Hacker News Reader

Hey Patrick, for those of us who don't read Kanji could you explain the difference?

The nobasu character (ー) ordinarily lengthens the vowel sound directly preceding it when you are reading katakana, the Japanese syllabary most commonly used for writing foreign words. 天 is kanji, and having ー after that is, well, if Japanese had a spec it would leave that behavior undefined.

[Edit: swap "proceeding" for "preceding." Engrish is hard.]

Others have already explained the elongation mark, but for those who are interested, there are so many foreign words that have been borrowed into Japanese that sometimes you get words that differ only in the usage of that elongation mark.

ビル: pronounced "biru" is a shortened word meaning building. ビール: pronounced "biiru" means beer.

ー is just a dash.

Are there dashes in Japanese? I suppose the interpunct character (・) best represents the idea.

The ー character is typically used with hiragana and katakana to elongate the previous character's tailing sound: リー for the name Lee (rii), メートル for meter (meetoru), as examples.

The ー character is not used after kanji because their sound cannot be elongated.

There are a few flavors of dashes in modern Japanese documents. Only one of the following three characters is a dash. ー―一 If you were aiming for a dash, you want the one in the middle, because the two to either side are very definitely not dashes.

Thanks for the detailed information! Actually it was referring to what you said earlier:

"The nobasu character (ー) ordinarily lengthens the vowel sound directly proceeding it"

But did not know that it "had" to be directly followed by katakana. :)

That is a very subtle emoticon. It evokes Totoro, for me.

Hah, excellent. Now it does that for me too.

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