Chapter 5. Characters in Each Country

44

Upper And Lower Cases

Japanese character does not have upper and lower case although there two sets of phonograms,

Hiragana and Katakana.

Thus

tolower()

and

toupper()

should not convert between Hiragana and Katakana.

Hiragana is used for usual text. Katakana is used mainly for express foreign or imported words,

for example, KONPYU TA for computer, MAIKUROSOFUTO for Microsoft, and AINSYUTAIN

for Einstein.

Sorting

Phonograms (Hiragana and Katakana) have sorting order. The order is same to defined in JIS X

0208, with a few exceptions.

Ideograms (Kanji) sorting is difficult. They should be sorted by their reading but almost all kanji

have a few readings according to the context. So if you want to sort Japanese text, you will need a

dictionary of whole Japanese Kanji words. And more, a few Japanese words written in Kanji have

different readings with exactly same series of Kanjis, this can occur especially for names of person.

So it is usual that addressbook databases have two 'name' columns, one for Kanji expression and

the other for Hiragana.

I know no softwares which can sort Japanese words in perfect way, including free and proprietary

softwares.

Ro ma ji (Alphabetic expression of Japanese)

We have a phonetic alphabetic expression of Japanese, Ro ma ji. It has almost one to one corre 

spondence to Japanese phonogram. It can be used to display Japanese text on Linux console and

so on. Since Japanese have many homophones this expression can be crabbed.

There are several variants of Ro ma ji.

The first distinguishing point is on handling of long syllable. For example, long syllable of 'E' is

expressed in:

  'E' with caret,

  'E' with upper bar,

  only 'E' in which long syllable mark is ignored,

  'EE',