Iteration mark
|
|
Iteration marks (Jp. 踊り字 odoriji "dancing mark" or 繰り返し kurikaeshi, lit. "repetition") are used in Japanese to represent a duplicated character: 人人 can thus also be written as 人々. Japanese has three different iteration marks for its three writing systems, namely kanji (々), hiragana (ゝ), and katakana (ヽ).
In Chinese, a similar mark is used in fast writing to represent a doubled character, but it is never used in careful writing or printed matter, while in Japanese using the kanji iteration mark is usually the preferred form.
Kanji
While Japanese does not have a grammatical plural form per se, some kanji can be reduplicated to indicate plurality. This differs for Chinese, which normally only repeats multiple characters for the purposes of adding emphasis, although there are some exceptions (eg. 人 ren person, 人人 renren everybody).
人 hito — person
人々 hitobito — people
山 yama — mountain
山々 yamayama — many mountains
However, for some words duplication may alter the meaning:
個 ko — piece, object
個々 koko — piece by piece, individually
時 toki — time
時々 tokidoki — sometimes
来週 raishū — next week
来々週 rairaishū — "next next week" (the week after next week)
Kana
For kana, the iteration mark can be employed when writing by hand but is rarely seen in formal or printed writing. The major exception is some personal names like さゝ川 Sasakawa or おゝ杉 Ōno. The kana iteration marks can also be combined with the dakuten voicing mark to indicate that the repeated syllable should be voiced, eg. みすゞ Misuzu. It is also possible to use multiple iteration marks to repeat a multisyllable word, as in ところゞゝゝ tokorodokoro, although in modern practice this is very uncommon.
Repeat marks
In addition to the single-character iteration marks, there are also two-character repeat marks. Used in vertical writing only, they are effectively obsolete in modern Japanese. The vertical hiragana repeat marks 〱 (unvoiced) and 〲 (voiced) resemble the hiragana character ku (く), while the vertical katakana repeat marks 〳(unvoiced) and 〴 (voiced) resemble the katakana character no (ノ), but are easily distinguished as they are typically printed stretched so they fill the space of two vertical kana.