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Notices by バツ子(این نیز بگذرد (shmibs@kawen.space)
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@rye
Yokohama.Kaidashi.Kikou.full.43…
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@augustus
well, if you're actually asking, a super simplified history:
so when chinese characters were adapted everything was written with them. lots of words and sounds and things didn't have semantically-assigned kanji, though, so having kanji assigned to particular sounds without any meaning attached was also necessary. in general, these symbol-to-sound matching morae are called kana, and the original kana using chinese characters were called manyougana.
these were useful but still a little complicated, since the set of them wasn't really standardised. basically people would just use whatever characters they knew the chinese readings of to spell stuff out, so there were lots that would get used for the same sounds and things. also, handwriting out entire kanji for everything like this was slow as heck.
zoom forwards a little and scribes and the like have developed shorthand versions, all super simplified so they can write them more quickly. of these there are pretty much two branches, one used by women and one by men. the Manly Man Man versions are standardised earlier on and become what we have now as katakana, but the other half lags behind because nobody likes girls.
the "girl half" has a lot of redundancies still for a while (these redundancies come from people simplifying different manyougana, or from simplifying those same kanji in different ways). these are eventually standardised also, but you can still see some of the old variations (called hentaigana) around sometimes in old stuff or places trying to look old-fashioned
so now there are two ways of sound-only writing, but for a while they're basically used just however by whoever prefers one or the other, right? and more than that, people writing stuff tend to use these kana for all sorts of things that even had semantically-assigned kanji, just because it's quicker. if you look at pre-war writing and things will see this all over the place, big walls of kana with just a few kanji sprinkled in important places
more time passes and a few kana get dropped from standard use (like "we", hiragana ゑ katakana ヱ), and what's left is the modern standard set. also in modern japanese, especially since computers have been useful, there's can be some semantic difference in meaning between instances of hiragana and katakana. as a sort of general rule, hiragana get used for "native japanese" things as a sort of default, and katakana are used to show some sort of distinction from the surrounding text, things like "this is a foreigner's name" or "this is a sound-only spelling of this character's name, and there may or may not be a kanji or hiragana spelling that isn't specified here". they get used a lot for foreign import words too, and there's a pretty common practice of spelling animal names with katakana even when kanji versions exist, maybe because there are a whole lot of different animals and most of their names aren't really used in everyday speech too often. sometimes katakana are used just for stylistic purposes too though, like in fancy title cards for things
basically, in modern japanese you can think of katakana as being like italics but more useful
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@shpuld
too many black things aaaah ;_;
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@JordiGH @lnxw48a1
not to get all "no you" about it, though. some people just enjoy being hostile, and they're spread pretty evenly throughout whatever ideology or software or community
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@JordiGH @lnxw48a1
eh, would question that also. i've two accounts, one on a mastodon instance and one on a pleroma instance, and the only hostility encountered thus far has been on the former from other "mastodon users". there's definitely a crowd there who's made a habit of perfecting the "insult you" -> "add in threats of violence" -> "block you" -> "denounce you to anyone who will listen" routine