The , colloquially , is a diacritic most often used in the Japanese kana syllabaries to indicate that the consonant of a syllable should be pronounced voiced, for instance, on sounds that have undergone rendaku (sequential voicing). The , colloquially , is a diacritic used with the kana for syllables starting with h to indicate that they should instead be pronounced with . History The kun'yomi pronunciation of the character is nigori; hence the daku-ten may also be called the nigori-ten. This character, meaning muddy or turbid, stems from historical Chinese phonology, where consonants were traditionally classified as clear ( "voiceless"), lesser-clear ( "aspirated") and muddy ( "voiced"). (See: Middle Chinese § Initials) Dakuten were used sporadically since the start of written Japanese; their use tended to become more common as time went on. The modern practice of using dakuten in all cases of voicing in all writing only came into being in the Meiji period. The handakuten is an innovation by Portuguese Jesuits, who first used it in the Rakuyōshū. These Jesuits had the need to accurately transcribe Japanese sounds, which the Japanese tended to neglect by making no distinction between /h/, /b/ and /p/ in their own writing. Glyphs The dakuten resembles a quotation mark, while the handakuten is a small circle, similar to a degree sign, both placed at the top right corner of a kana character: Both the dakuten and handakuten glyphs are drawn identically in hiragana and katakana scripts. The combining characters are rarely used in full-width Japanese characters, as Unicode and all common multibyte Japanese encodings provide precomposed glyphs for all possible dakuten and handakuten character combinations in the standard hiragana and katakana ranges. However, combining characters are required in half-width kana, which does not provide any precomposed characters in order to fit within a single byte. The similarity between the dakuten and quotation marks (") is not a problem, as written Japanese uses corner brackets (「」). Phonetic shifts The following table summarizes the phonetic shifts indicated by the dakuten and handakuten. Literally, syllables with dakuten are , while those without are . However, the handakuten (lit. "half-muddy mark") does not follow this pattern. Handakuten on ka, ki, ku, ke, ko (rendered as ) represent the sound of ng in singing (), which is an allophone of in many dialects of Japanese. They are not used in normal Japanese writing, but may be used