how many katakana signs?

[Paul Baardman]

Hi,

Can somebody tell me how many katakana signs there are?
Looking at the katakana articles on this site I count 92 signs.
When I take a look at the wikipedia page for katakana I count 129 signs. Is there a reason for this?

Paul

[astaroth]

Katakana? Do you mean kana, that is hiragana（あいうえお）and katakana（アイウエオ）?
Anyway the discrepancy could be due to counting が or きゃ as a different kana instead of variations of か、き、や ...

[Paul Baardman]

Thanks for your reply.

I mean katakana. I know the hiragana now and I'm starting with katakana.
When I count all the katakana including the variations I get a total of 92.
On the wikipedia site (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana) there are a lot more variations.

Are they less used?

[Yudan Taiteki]

Some are used more than others, and for different purposes. I think the TJP list may be missing some relatively common ones but that wikipedia list also has some that are quite rare. Make sure you pay attention to the color coding which is explained above the chart and read the footnotes as well.

[Paul Baardman]

Thanks very much for your explanation.

[astaroth]

Ah the wikipedia page is also considering the ones like ヴァ and so on ... which of course don't exist in hiragana.

[AJBryant]

The CORRECT answer, technically, is that there are 49. Period. Combinations or characters with dakuten marks are not different characters.

[Harisenbon]

Ah the wikipedia page is also considering the ones like ヴァ and so on ... which of course don't exist in hiragana.

ヴァ doesn't exist? Better tell http://www.evangelion.co.jp/ that they've been using made up katakana!

I wouldn't consider ヴァ to be a single character, but the combination is most certainly valid in Japanese.

[astaroth]

Sorry I meant they almost only appear in katakana and not in hiragana.

[Yudan Taiteki]

Ah the wikipedia page is also considering the ones like ヴァ and so on ... which of course don't exist in hiragana.

ヴァ doesn't exist? Better tell http://www.evangelion.co.jp/ that they've been using made up katakana!

I wouldn't consider ヴァ to be a single character, but the combination is most certainly valid in Japanese.

He said it didn't exist in hiragana, i.e. there is no ヴァ hiragana version. (This is not 100% accurate for all writing; every so often you get cases where hiragana is used for words that would otherwise be written in katakana, and then you can have ヴァ in hiragana -- I can't even get a う with dakuten to come up in the IME, though.)

[Harisenbon]

He said it didn't exist in hiragana, i.e. there is no ヴァ hiragana version.

Gah! you are right.
For some reason, when reading romaji, the words hiragana and katakana always look the same to me.


Sorry astaroth-san!

[furrykef]

When reading Japanese, all words look the same to me.

[astaroth]

He said it didn't exist in hiragana, i.e. there is no ヴァ hiragana version.

Gah! you are right.
For some reason, when reading romaji, the words hiragana and katakana always look the same to me.


Sorry astaroth-san!

It's ok, no worries. I was pretty 'dyslexic' yesterday for some reasons ...

[Ben Bullock]

Can somebody tell me how many katakana signs there are?

Well, in Unicode there are 164 characters which have the property "Katakana".

Looking at the katakana articles on this site I count 92 signs.
When I take a look at the wikipedia page for katakana I count 129 signs. Is there a reason for this?

As mentioned above, in Unicode there are 164 characters which are labelled as katakana, but of these 55 are halfwidth versions, 37 are small versions, two are iteration marks, and one, 30FF, is the "koto digraph mark". Also note that these include the versions with and without dakuten and handakuten.

If anyone wants even more details, send me a message.