Why do not all かな get dakuten? And why only the は ひ ふ へ ほ へ kana get handakuten?


Can anyone answer the questions above? Because this really confuses me.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Bajiru




Dakuten change the consonant of a kana in a specific way - namely, they add
voicing to a voiceless consonant. So さ /sa/ becomes ざ /za/, and so on. But
what about sounds that are already voiced, such as /n/? What in the world
would な゛ even mean? You can't make /n/ any more voiced than it already is.

As for handakuten, they exist specifically to add /p/ back into Japanese. When
the kana were originally created, what's now the /h/-row represented *p (or
rather *ɸ, descended from *p in Old Japanese). This *p changed to modern /h/,
but Japanese has since regained /p/ from Chinese loanwords. Thus, they needed
some way to write this new /p/, so they modified the old *p kana with a
handakuten to make them the new /p/ kana. Since this is an unsystematic change
- it doesn't affect a _class_ of sounds in any particular way like the dakuten
does - it's not clear what a handakuten added to a different kana would even
mean.

So in short, the reason that dakuten and handakuten are restricted to a subset
of kana is that if you added them to any other kana, there would be no clear
interpretation of the resulting combination.

There are some odd edge cases. Dakuten can be added to vowel kana in manga and
similar environments to indicate something like loudness or intensity (e.g.
あ゛あ゛あ゛あ゛あ゛！); though this is a bit uncommon. ゔ has been created as a way to
transcribe [v], though it's not consistently used (people often just write ぶ).
And k-row kana with a handakuten are sometimes used in linguistic works to
specify pronunciation with [ŋ] as opposed to [g] (e.g. か゜is specifically [ŋa],
not [ga], when in normal writing が could be either). Those are the only cases
of unusual combinations, though.




Dakuten change the consonant of a kana in a specific way - namely, they add
voicing to a voiceless consonant. So さ /sa/ becomes ざ /za/, and so on. But
what about sounds that are already voiced, such as /n/? What in the world
would な゛ even mean? You can't make /n/ any more voiced than it already is.

As for handakuten, they exist specifically to add /p/ back into Japanese. When
the kana were originally created, what's now the /h/-row represented *p (or
rather *ɸ, descended from *p in Old Japanese). This *p changed to modern /h/,
but Japanese has since regained /p/ from Chinese loanwords. Thus, they needed
some way to write this new /p/, so they modified the old *p kana with a
handakuten to make them the new /p/ kana. Since this is an unsystematic change
- it doesn't affect a _class_ of sounds in any particular way like the dakuten
does - it's not clear what a handakuten added to a different kana would even
mean.

So in short, the reason that dakuten and handakuten are restricted to a subset
of kana is that if you added them to any other kana, there would be no clear
interpretation of the resulting combination.

There are some odd edge cases. Dakuten can be added to vowel kana in manga and
similar environments to indicate something like loudness or intensity (e.g.
あ゛あ゛あ゛あ゛あ゛！); though this is a bit uncommon. ゔ has been created as a way to
transcribe [v], though it's not consistently used (people often just write ぶ).
And k-row kana with a handakuten are sometimes used in linguistic works to
specify pronunciation with [ŋ] as opposed to [g] (e.g. か゜is specifically [ŋa],
not [ga], when in normal writing が could be either). Those are the only cases
of unusual combinations, though.

