communications and literature. Hiragana is used to write the following: —inflectional endings for adjectives and verbs—such as in (miru, "see") and in (shiroi, "white"), and respectively and in their past tense inflections (mita, "saw") and (shirokatta, "was white"). various function words, including most grammatical particles, or postpositions ()—small, usually common words that, for example, mark sentence topics, subjects and objects or have a purpose similar to English prepositions such as "in", "to", "from", "by" and "for". miscellaneous other words of various grammatical types that lack a kanji rendition, or whose kanji is obscure, difficult to typeset, or considered too difficult to understand for the context (such as in children's books). —phonetic renderings of kanji placed above or beside the kanji character. Furigana may aid children or non-native speakers or clarify nonstandard, rare, or ambiguous readings, especially for words that use kanji not part of the jōyō kanji list. There is also some flexibility for words with common kanji renditions to be instead written in hiragana, depending on the individual author's preference (all Japanese words can be spelled out entirely in hiragana or katakana, even when they are normally written using kanji). Some words are colloquially written in hiragana and writing them in kanji might give them a more formal tone, while hiragana may impart a softer or more emotional feeling. For example, the Japanese word kawaii, the Japanese equivalent of "cute", can be written entirely in hiragana as in , or with kanji as . Some lexical items that are normally written using kanji have become grammaticalized in certain contexts, where they are instead written in hiragana. For example, the root of the verb (miru, "see") is normally written with the kanji for the mi portion. However, when used as a supplementary verb as in 試してみる (tameshite miru) meaning "to try out", the whole verb is typically written in hiragana as , as we see also in (tabete miru, "try to eat [it] and see"). Katakana emerged around the 9th century, in the Heian period, when Buddhist monks created a syllabary derived from Chinese characters to simplify their reading, using portions of the characters as a kind of shorthand. The origin of the alphabet is attributed to the monk Kūkai. Katakana is used to write the following: transliteration of foreign words and names, such as (konpyūta, "computer") and (Rondon, "London"). However, some foreign borrowings that were naturalized may be rendered