kana
Enable an agent to recognise kana as a Japanese writing-system family, assess kana representations and usage, and choose transformations that preserve the distinctions required by the task.
Research draft, second pass
A second pass drafted this model: the structure a model of this thing needs, and what is known about it in the world. The line under this one says how the second half was obtained - researched against sources, or recalled without web access, in which case nothing here was read anywhere and every claim is a lead to verify. Unreviewed either way.
recalled by Codex without web access - no source was read
Researched by: Codex
Purpose and description
Enable an agent to recognise kana as a Japanese writing-system family, assess kana representations and usage, and choose transformations that preserve the distinctions required by the task.
Kana are Japanese phonographic writing systems, principally hiragana and katakana, whose basic signs generally represent morae rather than individual phonemes or meanings.
It can be Identify hiragana, katakana and associated marks within mixed text.; Validate a kana sequence against a selected contemporary, historical or specialised orthographic profile.; Analyse kana combinations and propose contextual readings while preserving ambiguity.; Convert between hiragana and katakana where correspondence is established, recording exceptions and lost usage distinctions.; Normalise digital representations under an explicit fidelity policy while retaining the original sequence.; Produce transliteration or transcription candidates with named conventions and uncertainty annotations..
Distinguishing features
A kana sign or conventional combination primarily represents sound rather than the lexical meanings associated with kanji.
The repertoire must be identifiable as hiragana, katakana or a documented kana variant; Japanese-language content alone does not establish kana identity.
Moraic interpretation cannot be obtained by counting visible signs: small-kana combinations and signs such as small tsu require distinct rules.
Hiragana and katakana may correspond in reading while retaining different orthographic and stylistic functions.
A kana character, its displayed glyph and its encoded sequence are distinguishable; visual similarity alone does not establish identical representation.
Scope
+ Hiragana and katakana repertoires and relationships
+ Relationships between kana signs, combinations, morae and contextual readings
+ Small kana, voicing marks, prolonged-sound marks and iteration conventions
+ Contemporary, historical and specialised kana usage, with explicit profiles
+ Character identity, glyph variation, encoding and representation-preserving transformations
- Japanese grammar, vocabulary and phonology beyond their interface with kana
- Kanji as a complete writing system and the full organisation of mixed Japanese text
- Romanisation systems except as named conversion interfaces
- Authorship, editions and rights of works containing kana
- Physical manuscripts, printed carriers and font software as independently managed objects
Characteristics
- Kana subsystem
- hiragana | katakana | mixed kana | documented historical variant | unresolved Selects the repertoire and correspondence rules that an agent may apply.
- Orthographic profile
- Named convention with language, period, community and source Prevents modern Japanese conventions from being imposed on historical or specialised usage.
- Sign and combination role
- ordinary kana | small kana | voicing mark | prolonged-sound mark | iteration mark | profile-specific role Determines how a sign contributes to reading and whether neighbouring signs are required.
- Contextual reading
- Kana sequence linked to a reading under a stated orthographic and linguistic context Separates conventional sound values from context-dependent pronunciation.
- Mora count
- morae per interpreted sequence; unknown when reading is unresolved Supports pronunciation and prosodic tasks without confusing character count with sound structure.
- Encoding representation
- Encoding name, code-point sequence, normalisation form and width variant where applicable Makes representation differences and conversion effects inspectable.
- Interpretation status
- resolved | context-dependent | ambiguous | outside selected profile | unreadable Controls whether an agent can safely interpret or transform the sequence.
- Transformation fidelity
- exactly reversible | reading-preserving under stated assumptions | lossy | unassessed Makes clear which distinctions a proposed conversion retains.
Also called
Where this came from
wikidata · CC0 1.0
Drafted structure
Bundle to layer to finding to question, as the second pass will find it: 6 bundles · 11 layers · 19 findings · 30 questions.
Kana identity and repertoire Establishes which kana subsystem and repertoire the model instance describes.
Kana must be recognised as a writing-system family rather than mistaken for Japanese text generally or an authored medium.
Subsystem boundaries
Separates hiragana, katakana and documented variants from neighbouring sign systems.
Kana membership
Record the evidence that a sign belongs to a kana repertoire, separating character identity from visual resemblance.
- Which repertoire establishes this sign as hiragana, katakana or another documented kana form? definition
- Could the observed form instead be a kanji, punctuation mark or visually similar non-kana character? boundary
Repertoire profiles
Defines membership relative to period, language and usage convention.
Profile-dependent inventory
Record ordinary, historical and specialised signs against an explicit repertoire rather than assuming one universal kana inventory.
- Which period, language and usage community define the applicable kana inventory? definition
- Which reference documents the inclusion and status of historical forms or specialised small katakana? provenance
Sound and sequence interpretation Connects kana sequences to sound units without equating every written sign with a syllable.
Reading and pronunciation tasks depend on combinations, moraic structure and context.
Moraic composition
Interprets ordinary signs, small-kana combinations and special moraic roles.
Written units and morae
Record how signs combine for reading, including contracted sounds, small tsu and moraic n.
- Which adjacent kana form a combined reading unit under the selected profile? definition
- How many morae does the interpreted sequence contain, and which interpretation supports that count? measurement
Contextual sound values
Captures dependencies between written kana, pronunciation and linguistic context.
Reading disambiguation
Keep written form distinct from contextual reading, including particle spellings and vowel-sequence interpretation.
- Does grammatical or lexical context change the expected reading, as with は, へ or を in particle use? boundary
- What context must an agent obtain before selecting a pronunciation or interpreting a vowel sequence as length? action
Kana orthographic functions Models script choice and the conventions governing kana-associated marks.
Matching sound values alone cannot establish that two kana expressions are interchangeable.
Script choice
Records the function of hiragana or katakana in a particular expression.
Script-choice significance
Record whether subsystem choice serves grammatical, lexical, reading-aid, emphasis or stylistic purposes.
- What function does hiragana or katakana serve in this occurrence, and what contextual evidence supports that interpretation? definition
- Would conversion to the corresponding kana subsystem alter emphasis, convention or the role of a reading annotation? action
Modifiers and repetition
Interprets voicing, length and iteration marks under the selected convention.
Mark attachment and effect
Record the host or preceding context required by dakuten, handakuten, prolonged-sound marks and kana iteration marks.
- Which kana or preceding sequence does each mark modify or repeat? definition
- Does the selected orthographic profile permit this mark in this position, and how should unresolved uses be retained? action
Kana digital representation Separates kana character identity from code points, combining sequences and displayed forms.
Search, comparison and conversion can silently lose distinctions when they treat all visually similar kana as identical.
Characters and glyphs
Records encoded characters and their relationship to visible kana forms.
Representation equivalence
Distinguish precomposed and combining representations, width variants and font-dependent glyph differences.
- What exact code-point sequence represents the kana and any attached voicing marks? measurement
- Is an observed difference a distinct kana character, an encoding alternative or a glyph variation? boundary
Normalisation and matching
Defines which kana distinctions a digital operation may collapse.
Task-specific equivalence
Record separate policies for Unicode normalisation, width folding and script-insensitive matching.
- May this task ignore width, voicing representation or hiragana-katakana differences, and which distinctions must remain searchable? action
- Which original distinctions would the proposed operation erase, and can the original sequence be recovered? measurement
Historical forms and conversion Governs interpretation across historical kana usage and conversion into other representations.
Modernisation and transliteration require explicit conventions and must expose unresolved or lossy mappings.
Historical interpretation
Places historical spellings and variant forms in a documented context.
Historical form resolution
Preserve observed historical forms separately from proposed modern equivalents or readings.
- Which dated specimen or reference supports the identification of this historical kana form or spelling? provenance
- Is the proposed modern equivalent a character correspondence, an orthographic modernisation or an inferred pronunciation? boundary
Conversion contracts
Defines the assumptions and fidelity of kana conversion operations.
Conversion with declared loss
Record source and target conventions, contextual assumptions, unsupported forms and recoverability.
- Which named convention governs conversion to another kana subsystem, romanisation or pronunciation notation? definition
- Should the agent return alternatives or preserve the source unchanged when the mapping is ambiguous or unsupported? action
- Which spelling, script-choice or historical distinctions cannot be reconstructed from the converted output? measurement
Evidence and external alignment What the world already says about this thing, gathered so the model can be checked against it.
A model that cannot be lined up against existing standards, identifiers and practice cannot be adopted by anyone who already uses them.
Reported evidence
Findings from the breadth pass, kept separate from the structural claims.
Check these first
Recalled without web access and unsourced; every item is a lead to verify.
- The intended sense is inferred to be the Japanese writing systems because no registry definition was supplied.
- Kana is a script category, not an individual creative work, edition or physical carrier.
- Historical inventories and language-specific extensions require checking against the particular period and orthographic convention.
- Which of these check these first hold for the sense of kana this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance
Kinds and varieties
Recalled without web access and unsourced; every item is a lead to verify.
- Hiragana
- Katakana
- Hentaigana, historical variant forms of hiragana
- Which of these kinds and varieties hold for the sense of kana this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance
Identifiers and schemes
Recalled without web access and unsourced; every item is a lead to verify.
- ISO 15924 - Hira - Script code for hiragana.
- ISO 15924 - Kana - Script code for katakana, despite the broader meaning of the name kana.
- ISO 15924 - Hrkt - Code for Japanese syllabaries, representing hiragana and katakana together.
- Unicode - U+3040-U+309F; U+30A0-U+30FF - The principal Hiragana and Katakana blocks; additional kana characters occur in other blocks.
- Which of these identifiers and schemes hold for the sense of kana this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance
Standards and regulation
Recalled without web access and unsourced; every item is a lead to verify.
- ISO 15924, issued by ISO, provides script identification codes.
- The Unicode Standard, maintained by the Unicode Consortium, defines character encoding and normalization relevant to kana.
- ISO/IEC 10646, issued by ISO and IEC, includes kana in the Universal Coded Character Set.
- Which of these standards and regulation hold for the sense of kana this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance
Real-world use
Recalled without web access and unsourced; every item is a lead to verify.
- Hiragana writes grammatical particles, inflectional endings and words rendered without kanji.
- Katakana commonly writes loanwords, foreign names, emphasis and sound-symbolic expressions.
- Kana annotations called furigana indicate readings of kanji.
- Kana supports Japanese literacy instruction, dictionaries and text input.
- Extended katakana conventions support writing Ainu.
- Which of these real-world use hold for the sense of kana this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance
Typical measurements
Recalled without web access and unsourced; every item is a lead to verify.
- Basic signs in each modern standard syllabary - 46 - signs - Excludes obsolete signs, voiced derivatives, small forms and combinations.
- Which of these typical measurements hold for the sense of kana this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance
Failure modes and hazards
Recalled without web access and unsourced; every item is a lead to verify.
- Treating kana as strictly syllabic obscures distinctions involving the moraic nasal, gemination and long vowels.
- Confusing visually similar characters can produce reading, transcription or recognition errors.
- Inconsistent handling of combining voicing marks and precomposed characters can disrupt text matching.
- Fullwidth and halfwidth katakana can cause search or validation mismatches when normalization is inadequate.
- Modernizing historical kana spelling can erase distinctions important to textual scholarship.
- Which of these failure modes and hazards hold for the sense of kana this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance
Regional variation
Recalled without web access and unsourced; every item is a lead to verify.
- Modern standard Japanese kana spelling differs from historical kana orthography.
- Ainu katakana uses additional small-letter conventions to represent sounds that ordinary Japanese katakana does not directly distinguish.
- Kana conventions for Ryukyuan languages vary across languages and orthographic proposals.
- Which of these regional variation hold for the sense of kana this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance
Neighbouring kinds and how to tell them apart
Recalled without web access and unsourced; every item is a lead to verify.
- Kanji - Kanji primarily represents morphemes through characters of Chinese origin; kana primarily represents sound units.
- Romaji - Romaji represents Japanese using Latin letters rather than kana signs.
- Japanese language - Japanese is a language; kana comprises writing systems used to represent it.
- Man'yogana - Man'yogana uses Chinese characters for their phonetic values and is a historical precursor to the simplified kana systems.
- Furigana - Furigana is a reading-annotation function, usually performed with kana, rather than a separate script.
- Which of these neighbouring kinds and how to tell them apart hold for the sense of kana this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance
What the second pass must settle
- Does the registry intend kana to cover the entire writing-system family, and is any part already owned by an existing Vercy world model?
- Which authoritative references should define the baseline contemporary repertoire and permitted kana combinations?
- How far should historical coverage extend into hentaigana and manuscript forms, and where should specialist palaeographic models take ownership?
- Which specialised or non-Japanese kana usages require explicit profiles, particularly Ainu katakana?
- Which encoding-standard version and conversion references should anchor digital equivalence, normalisation and transliteration policies?