After doing some research on katakana and its most common uses, I've found that it's mostly used in "foreign words, technical terms, scientific names, onomatopoeia, and sometimes for emphasis".
With the most common case that I've seen being foreign words, katakana adapts these foreign words to fit Japanese pronunciation rules. This isn't only applicable to english words, but any foreign word in general. For example, in the image below containing coffee shop terms, the katakana word パン translates to bread, but the pronunciation 'pan' is derived from Portuguese language as opposed to english:
Finally, scientific names for species and/or plants are often written in katakana as a form of "emphasis", something equivalent to how the english language uses Italics to indicate a scientific term. "Homo sapiens (ホモ・サピエンス Homo sapiensu), as a species, is written ヒト (hito), rather than its kanji 人."
Sources:
https://migaku.com/blog/japanese/katakana-words
http://japanese-name-generator.com/2013/11/03/about-japanse-katakana/
I never thought about technology advancing becoming a reason as to why Japanese use Katakana. It does make a lot of sense because words are evolving and changing and the best way of representing new words are through Katakana.
ReplyDeleteI think that's a really interesting comparison that you bring up at the end about katakana bringing emphasis in Japanese in the same way that Italics does for English, when discussing scientific names. That does help put it in context!
ReplyDeleteGreat findings! Thank you for sharing with the class !!!
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