katakana - Japanese alphabet

Katakana (Japanese 片 仮 名) literally translates from Japanese as “angular alphabet”. This name justifies itself: the katakana signs are angular and sharp, in contrast to the hiragana signs. In writing, katakana is easier than hiragana, but nevertheless, for some reason, it is more difficult to remember, apparently due to its rarer use. Katakana was invented for rewriting Chinese texts, in particular, Buddhist sutras, and it, just like hiragana, originated from Chinese characters, but not from whole characters, but from their parts.
Although many of her signs differ from those of hiragana, the principle of construction is exactly the same: the same syllables, syllables with nigori and hannigori are formed in the same way, syllables with soft consonants, a small tsu denotes the longitude of a consonant, etc. The difference is only in the fact that the longitude of a vowel when writing a word in katakana is indicated by a horizontal bar, and not by the letter y or by doubling the vowel. Katakana is mainly used to write gairaigo, words that the Japanese have borrowed from languages other than Chinese (although some Chinese words are also written in katakana). In addition, katakana can also be used to write the actual Japanese words, which were once written in hieroglyphs. Also katakana is used for underlining, highlighting a word in the text, as we use italics.