Letter Case - Other Forms of Case

Other Forms of Case

The distinction between hiragana and katakana in Japanese is similar to, but not the same as, case; it may also be considered analogous to upright and italics characters. While each sound has both a hiragana and katakana, any given word will use only one of the two scripts normally. If a word is written with hiragana, it is not normally considered correct to write it with katakana, and vice versa. However, katakana may be substituted for hiragana or kanji to add emphasis or make them stand out, similar to the use of capitalization or italics in English. Another specific usage of hiragana is as rubi (ルビ) or furigana (振り仮名). This is a small attachement to Kanji, often used with personal names with ambiguous reading, difficult to read characters, unusual usage or irregular readings of Kanji. These rubi are atached to the right side of Kanji in vertical typesetting (Tategaki 縦書き) and above the character in horizontal typesetting (Yokogaki 横書き) and rendered in half size to fit in with the Kanji.

Also similar to case is recent usage in Georgian, where some authors use isolated letters from the Asomtavruli alphabet within a text otherwise written in Mkhedruli in a fashion that is reminiscent of modern usage of letter case in the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets.