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Comment by superjan | Hacker News Reader

For curiosity: how are they sorted? Are hiragana/katakana symbols considered equivalent?

The hiragana and katakana and various versions thereof for each mora all share the same "primary" Unicode collation value. Adding a dakuten or handakuten creates a secondary difference: e.g. は (ha) < ば (ba) < ぱ (pa).

As between the versions for the same mora, they get sorted with tertiary differences as: hiragana comes before katakana, small comes before regular-size, and for katakana regular width comes before halfwidth. There's also a "circled" set of the katakana that sort after the halfwidth ones.

So they're equivalent (or not) depending on how you're doing the collation/comparison.

The article shows how they are sorted. Hiragana is used for things like Japanese words, particles, names, and to conjugate verbs. Katakana is used for things like foreign words, names, and sometimes emphasis. Both writing systems describe the same phonetics. For example, the hiragana か and katakana カ are both pronounced “ka.”

I'm surprised they're both used, from that description it sounds like one would fall by the wayside, like cursive has in North America.

...

That said, culturally Japan seems like exactly the kind of place where, were they English-speakers, all the kids would absolutely be required to learn perfect cursive.

> I'm surprised they're both used, from that description it sounds like one would fall by the wayside, like cursive has in North America.

In practice, there are no less than 4 separate scripts that are used in Japanese: hiragana, katakana, kanji, and romaji, and some mix of all 4 can appear in the same sentence.

It's not so much analogous to cursive, which is a different "style" of writing the same "thing" – katakana and hiragana developed at different times for different groups and came to play different roles, and there are (usually) semantic implications to which are used.

It’s more akin to italics in usage than to cursive.

English print still has two separate character sets with exactly the same pronunciation too. One is use most of the time, and the other is used to start sentences, for EMPHASIS on whole words, or to indicate proper nouns.

I am very early on in my Japanese-learning journey. So if others contradict me, they are probably a better source. :)

But from what I understand Hirigana is used more for Japanese words, and Katakana more for loan words from other languages.

It actually leads to a nice shortcut for some words. If I’m reading Hirigana I’ll try to match that with words in Japanese that I know. However, if the word I’m looking at is Katakana, I’ll flip that off and start trying to match phonetically.

I assume with fluency this all becomes automatic, but I’m a ways off from that yet!

My understanding is that katakana is used for situations where it’s the sound that is important, not necessarily the meaning. So it’s used for loan words, but also for onomatopoeia, and when writing your name down on a waitlist at a restaurant. (Often it is not clear how to pronounce a name from how it is written)

Katakana is also used for the names of animals. Even when the name is native japanese.

Yes! Sushi menus are often entirely in katakana.

This is not correct. Sushi menus for restaurants in Tokyo use a mixture of kanji, hiragana, and katakana.

The reverse is true for words like たばこ (tobacco). It's a foreign word but is almost always spelled using hiragana.

Yes, but Katakana is also sometimes AFAIK used for spelling out words that otherwise would be written with kanji, and sometimes for emphasis (like italics in Latin script).

> I'm surprised they're both used, from that description it sounds like one would fall by the wayside, like cursive has in North America.

Katakana, hiragana, and kanji are all in active use--that's why they don't fall away.

Kanji are your primary word base. They are sort of like root words in English.

Hiragana often serves as kind of a marker--endings of certain words as well as phrase markers (particles). These are particularly important because Japanese does not normally break words with spaces.

Katakana often denotes a foreign phonetic word or foreign names. Login is particularly good example for this forum: ログイン (ro-gu-i-n).

Japanese speakers actively use the differences as cues when reading. Watch a native Japanese speaker try to puzzle out Japanese learning materials for non-native speakers. If everything is written in hiragana (not uncommon for beginning materials), native speakers often have to puzzle over things a bit before they work out what a sentence says. This is one of the reasons why you want to get to Kanji as fast as possible when learning Japanese--the differences in script are important for reading comprehension.

You can see all of these in play on the Asahi Shimbun webpage: https://www.asahi.com/

Japanese people could ask the same question about why English continues to have uppercase and lowercase letters.

Actually when you look at the use of English in Japanese media, you’ll quickly notice a lot of unnatural-looking overuse of uppercase. That’s because to them it feels natural to use uppercase the same way they use katakana.

A very rough equivalence would be that hiragana is a regular typeface, while katakana is italics.

They are sorted by dictionary order (五十音順 gojuuonjun) and there are no duplicated symbols in hiragana-katakana blocks.

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