Kana systems are a set of Japanese syllabic writing systems composed of characters that primarily represent morae, the phonological units underlying Japanese syllable structure. The term refers collectively to hiragana and katakana, two related kana scripts that encode the phonological form of Japanese rather than directly representing lexical meaning. Each kana character generally corresponds to a single moraic unit, although certain phonological features, such as consonant gemination and vowel length, involve additional orthographic conventions. Kana systems differ from kanji, which are logographic characters used to represent lexical and semantic units, and from alphabetic writing systems, which represent individual phonemes rather than morae [1].
Japanese writing system; hiragana; katakana; moraic script