DAKUTEN

(Redirected from Handakuten)

, colloquially ''ten-ten'' ("dot dot"), is a diacritic sign most often used in the Japanese kana syllabaries to indicate that the consonant of a syllable should be pronounced voiced. '''Handakuten''' (半濁点), colloquially ''maru'' ("circle"), is a diacritic used with the ''kana'' for syllables starting with ''h'' to indicate that they should instead be pronounced with [p]. The ''kun-yomi'' pronunciation of the character 濁 is ''nigori''; hence the ''daku-ten'' may also be called the ''nigori-ten''. The meaning of this character—''muddy'' or ''turbid''—is a hint that the theory behind this kind of spelling device originally came from China, where consonant sounds were traditionally described by terms such as ''clear'', ''half-clear'', ''muddy'', and so on.
In informal writing it is occasionally used on vowels to indicate a shocked or strangled articulation.
The dakuten became standard practice in the Tokugawa era; previously, written Japanese did not distinguish between voiceless and voiced consonants.

Contents

Glyphs

Phonetic shifts

Kana iteration marks

Mnemonic devices

Glyphs

The ''dakuten'' resembles a quotation mark, while the ''handakuten'' is a small circle, similar to a degree sign, both placed at the top right corner of a ''kana'' character:
:□゛ ''dakuten'' (U+3099)
:□゜ ''handakuten'' (U+309A)
The ''dakuten'' glyph is drawn identically in both the hiragana and katakana scripts and so is the ''handakuten''. The combining characters are rarely used in full-width Japanese characters, as Unicode and all common multibyte Japanese encodings provide precomposed glyphs for all possible ''dakuten'' and ''handakuten'' character combinations in the standard ''hiragana'' and ''katakana'' ranges. However, combining characters are required in half-width katakana, which does not provide any precomposed characters in order to fit within a single byte.
Quotes in written Japanese often use corner brackets (「」), so the similarity of ''dakuten'' and quotation marks (") isn't a problem.

Phonetic shifts

: ''See also: hiragana, Japanese phonology''
The following table summarizes the phonetic shifts caused by the ''dakuten'' and ''handakuten''. Literally, syllables with dakuten are "muddy sounds" (濁音 ''dakuon''), while those without are "clear sounds" (清音 ''seion''), but the handakuten (lit. "half-muddy mark") does not follow this pattern.

none	''dakuten''	''handakuten''
か ''ka''	が ''ga''	(か゚ ''nga'')
さ ''sa''	ざ ''za''
た ''ta''	だ ''da''
は ''ha''	ば ''ba''	ぱ ''pa''

Handakuten on ''ka, ki, ku, ke, ko'' are not used in normal Japanese writing, but may be used by linguists and in dictionaries to represent the sound of ''ng'' in ''singing'' (IPA: ), which is an allophone of in some dialects of Japanese. This is called ''bidakuon'' (鼻濁音), "nasal muddy sound".
In katakana only, the dakuten may also be added to the character ウ ''u'' and a small vowel character to create a /v/ sound, as in ヴァ ''va''. As "V" does not exist in Japanese, this usage applies only to some modern loanwords and remains relatively uncommon, and e.g. Venus is typically transliterated as ビーナス ''biinasu'' instead of ヴィーナス ''viinasu''. Many Japanese, however, would pronounce both the same, with a /b/ sound, and may or may not recognize them as representing the same word.
An even less common method is to add dakuten to the w- series, reviving the now defunct characters for /wi/ (ヰ) and /we/ (ヱ). /vu/ is represented by using /u/, as above; /wo/ becomes /vo/ despite its W normally being silent. Precomposed characters exist for this method as well (/va/ ヷ /vi/ ヸ /vu/ ヴ /ve/ ヹ /vo/ ヺ), although most IMEs do not have a convenient way to enter them.

Kana iteration marks

: ''See also: Iteration mark''
The dakuten can also be added to hiragana and katakana iteration marks, indicating that the previous kana is repeated with voicing:

	none	''dakuten''
hiragana	ゝ	ゞ
katakana	ヽ	ヾ

Both signs are relatively rare, but can occasionally be found in personal names such as ''Misuzu'' (みすゞ). In these cases the pronunciation is identical to writing the kana out in full. There is also a longer multi-character repeat mark called ''kunojiten'', which is only used in vertical writing, and this also can have a dakuten added.

Mnemonic devices

It's much easier for non-native speakers to remember the phonetic shift through the use of a mnemonic device starting with the original sound and ending with the changed sound.
An example would be:

★ 'K'e'g'

★ 'S'oyu'z'

★ 'T'imi'd'

★ 'H'u'b'

★ 'H'o'p' (especially helpful since both "o" and the handakuten are circles)
An alternate device can be used to remember which dakuten to use on the H-series to create the B- and P-series: the letter B, like the dakuten, has two components affixed to the vertical upright, whereas the letter P, like the half-dakuten, has one component.