The is a Japanese symbol in the form of a small hiragana or katakana, as well as the various consonants represented by it. In less formal language, it is called or, meaning "small ".[1] It serves multiple purposes in Japanese writing.
In both hiragana and katakana, the appears as a reduced in size:
| Full-sized | Sokuon | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Hiragana | Japanese: つ | Japanese: っ | |
| Katakana | Japanese: ツ | Japanese: ッ |
The main use of the is to mark a geminate consonant, which is represented in most romanization systems by the doubling of the consonant, except that Hepburn romanization writes a geminate ch as tch. It denotes the gemination of the initial consonant of the symbol that follows it.
Examples:
The sokuon never appears at the beginning of a word or before a vowel (a, i, u, e, or o), and rarely appears before a syllable that begins with the consonants n, m, r, w, or y. (In words and loanwords that require geminating these consonants,,,,, and are usually used, respectively, instead of the sokuon.) In addition, it does not appear before voiced consonants (g, z, d, or b), or before h, except in loanwords, or distorted speech, or dialects. However, uncommon exceptions exist for stylistic reasons: For example, the Japanese name of the Pokémon species Cramorant is Japanese: ウッウ, pronounced pronounced as //uʔu//.[2]
The sokuon is also used at the end of a sentence, to indicate a glottal stop (IPA pronounced as /[ʔ]/, a sharp or cut-off articulation),[3] which may indicate angry or surprised speech. This pronunciation is also used for exceptions mentioned before (e.g., a sokuon before a vowel kana). There is no standard way of romanizing the sokuon that is at the end of a sentence. In English writing, this is often rendered as an em dash. Other conventions are to render it as t or as an apostrophe.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the sokuon is transcribed with either a colon-like length mark or a doubled consonant:
The sokuon represents a mora, thus for example the word consists of only two syllables, but four morae: ni-p-po-n.[4]
Major Japanese dictionaries list, as a synonym for .[5] [6] [7] This suggests an origin in Middle Chinese phonology, where sokusei, also known as, referred to a checked tone, or a syllable that ends in an unreleased plosive (see 促聲). 促聲 contrasts with 舒聲 (literally "leisurely voice") which is a syllable that ends in a vowel, semivowel, or nasal (see 舒聲).
The Meiji-era linguist Ōshima Masatake used the terms sokuon ("plosive") and hatsuon ("nasal") to describe ending consonants in Chinese (which he called, an outdated term used from the Edo period until after World War II[5] [6]). These sounds were classified as, and . Sokuon, in particular, were classified as follows: pronounced as /[p̚]/ is the, pronounced as /[t̚]/ is the, and pronounced as /[k̚]/ is the .[8] Another of Ōshima's descriptions even more explicitly related the terms sokuon and hatsuon to the four tones of Middle Chinese.[9]
Modern Japanese sokuon arose, in no small part, from consonant assimilation that occurred when an Early Middle Japanese approximation of a Chinese sokuon, such as pu (labial), t(i) (lingual) or ki/ku (guttural), was followed by an obstruent (plosive or fricative).[10]
In addition to Japanese, sokuon is used in Okinawan katakana orthographies to represent glottal or ejective consonants. Ainu katakana uses a small Ainu: ッ both for a final t-sound and to represent a sokuon (there is no ambiguity however, as gemination is allophonic with syllable-final t).
There are several methods of entering the sokuon using a computer or word-processor, such as xtu, ltu, ltsu, etc. Some systems, such as Kotoeri for macOS and the Microsoft IME, generate a sokuon if an applicable consonant letter is typed twice; for example tta generates Japanese: った.