Help! A common character, but not in any dictionaries...

[shiyoraider]

Yeah.. I see this horizontal line so much, but whenever I cross reference my Hiragana and Katakana character lists, and even Kanji, I can never find it!! T___T

Please, someone tell me what it is. I have an attachment. If it doesn't work I can upload it somewhere. It seriously bothers me! I think people have casual-style writing of Japanese characters, and they should have casual alphabets as well as the formal ones!! But no sites do =(

Please help!

Thankie in advance~ (it's the second character.. I was able to translate the blue snakey things in Emil Chronicles Online to Pururu but I can't translate this monster name into phonetic sounds.. T_T)

[Alpha9]

It just makes the previous character have a longer sound.

like:
ありがとう <--- the う makes the と have a longer sound

アーチン <----- the ー makes the ア　have a longer sound.

the ー is used only in Katakana I believe.

[KeroGero]

In alot of comics, it's used with both hiragana and katakana. It's just a doubling of the vowel from the previous character.
あー>aa, this is often used to immitete an "er" sound not found in Japanese, like in "super" (supaa)
いー>ii
うー>uu
えー>"ee", or "ei" both romaji are correct, just depends on prefrence
おー"oo" or "ou" again, both romaji are correct
Of course, the effect is the same as writing out the actual character, but it's easier to write this way :P

[Kates]

I tend to think of it more as 'stretching' a sound, instead of doubling it, but I supposed they end up sounding the same. ^_^

shiyo: There are few native Japanese words that do this, so that's why this mark (ー) is almost exclusively used with katakana. (Though Kero is right, you can see ー after some hiragana.) On your keyboard, when typing in Japanese, you simply use the hyphen key (-) to get this mark.

It works just like Kero and Alpha said, almost like the う in words spelled in hiragana--to stretch out the お or う sounds. There are few native Japanese words with long あ or い sounds (usually written ああ or いい), and ones with long え sounds are typically spelled えい (like Kero said).

But words in katakana are typically foreign words, which have many different sounds than native Japanese, so the ー is used to compensate, instead of repeating the character. (:　Long オ and ウ sounds are not written with an extra ウ (like hiragana words are).

Your word was アーチン (AACHIN), so it could also be written アアチン. But for the simplicity of it, the Japanese often use ー instead of repeating characters.

Here's another example to show you how it works:
ありがとう
アリガトー
ウ is not used in the katakana version, the ー is instead.

[AJBryant]

>>On your keyboard, when typing in Japanese, you simply use the hyphen key (-) to get this mark.

Erm.... no. There's a specific key for that character. On a Mac, IIRC, it's option-hyphen when in katakana input mode. But it is NOT a hyphen, texturally or typographically.

Tony

[skrhgh3b]

Kates wrote:
I tend to think of it more as 'stretching' a sound, instead of doubling it, but I supposed they end up sounding the same. ^_^

yeah, that's why i used the word "elongated"


edit: oh, sorry. i could have sworn i responded to this question before. maybe that was in another thread. was there a double post of this?