Shi (kana)

し, in hiragana, or シ in katakana, is one of the Japanese kana, which each represent one mora. Both represent the phoneme /si/ although for phonological reasons, the actual pronunciation is [ɕi]. The shapes of these kana have origins in the character 之. The katakana form has become increasingly popular as an emoticon in the Western world due to its resemblance to a smiling face, thus this variant form ㋛ was created.

This character may be combined with a dakuten, forming じ in hiragana, ジ in katakana, and ji in Hepburn romanization; the pronunciation becomes /zi/ (phonetically [d͡ʑi] or [ʑi] in the middle of words).

The dakuten form of this character is used when transliterating "di" occasionally, as opposed to チ's dakuten form; for example, Aladdin is written as アラジン Arajin, and radio is written as ラジオ.

In the Ainu language, シ is used to represent the ʃi sound. It can also be written as a small ㇱ to represent a final s sound, pronounced ɕ.

Stroke order

Other representations

Japanese honorifics

The Japanese language uses a broad array of honorific suffixes for addressing or referring to people. These honorifics attach to the end of people's names, as in Aman-san where the honorific -san was attached to the name Aman. These honorifics are often gender-neutral, but some imply a more feminine context (such as -chan) while others imply a more masculine one (such as -kun).

These honorifics are often used along with other forms of Japanese honorific speech, keigo, such as that used in conjugating verbs.

Usage

Although honorifics are not part of the basic grammar of the Japanese language, they are a fundamental part of the sociolinguistics of Japanese, and proper use is essential to proficient and appropriate speech. Significantly, referring to oneself using an honorific, or dropping an honorific when it is required, is a serious faux pas, in either case coming across as clumsy or arrogant.

They can be applied to either the first or last name depending on which is given. In situations where both the first and last names are spoken, the suffix is attached to whichever comes last in the word order.

Chinese surname

Chinese surnames are used by Han Chinese and Sinicized ethnic groups in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, Vietnam and among overseas Chinese communities. In ancient times two types of surnames existed, namely xing (Chinese: 姓; pinyin: xìng) or clan names, and shi (Chinese: 氏; pinyin: shì) or lineage names.

Chinese family names are patrilineal, passed from father to children. (In cases of adoption, the adoptee usually also takes the same surname.) Women do not normally change their surnames upon marriage, except in places with more Western influences such as Hong Kong. Traditionally Chinese surnames have been exogamous.

The colloquial expressions laobaixing (老百姓; lit. "old hundred surnames") and bǎixìng (百姓, lit. "hundred surnames") are used in Chinese to mean "ordinary folks", "the people", or "commoners".

Origin of Chinese surnames

Four occupations

The four occupations or "four categories of the people" (simplified Chinese: 士农工商; traditional Chinese: 士農工商 ) was a hierarchic social class structure developed in ancient China by either Confucian or Legalist scholars as far back as the late Zhou Dynasty and is considered a central part of the Fengjian social structure (c. 1046–256 BC). In descending order, these were the shi (gentry scholars), the nong (peasant farmers), the gong (artisans and craftsmen), and the shang (merchants and traders). In some manner this system of social order was adopted throughout the Chinese cultural sphere. In Japanese it is called mibunsei (身分制) and is sometimes stated as "Shi, nō, kō, shō" (士農工商,, shinōkōshō), in Korean as "Sa, nong, gong, sang" (사농공상), and in Vietnamese as "Sĩ, nông, công, thương (士農工商). The main difference in adaptation was the definition of the shi (士).

The system did not figure in all other social groups present in premodern Chinese society, and its broad categories were more an idealization than a practical reality. The commercialization of Chinese society in the Song and Ming periods further blurred the lines between these four hierarchic social distinctions. The definition of the identity of the shi class changed over time, from an ancient warrior caste, to an aristocratic scholarly elite, and finally to a bureaucratic scholarly elite with less emphasis on archaic noble lineage. There was also a gradual fusion of the wealthy merchant and landholding gentry classes, culminating in the late Ming Dynasty.

Kana

Kana (仮名) are syllabic Japanese scripts, a part of the Japanese writing system contrasted with the logographic Chinese characters known in Japan as kanji (漢字). There are three kana scripts: modern cursive hiragana (ひらがな) that in past time known as a women script (women handwriting), modern angular katakana (カタカナ), and the old syllabic use of kanji known as man’yōgana (万葉仮名) that was ancestral to both. Hentaigana (変体仮名, "variant kana") are historical variants of modern standard hiragana. In modern Japanese, hiragana and katakana have directly corresponding character sets (different sets of characters representing the same sounds).

Katakana with a few additions is also used to write Ainu. Kana was used in Taiwanese as a gloss (furigana) for Chinese characters during the Japanese administration of Taiwan. See Taiwanese kana.

Each kana character (syllabogram) corresponds to one sound in the Japanese language. This is always CV (consonant onset with vowel nucleus), such as ka, ki, etc., or V (vowel), such as a, i, etc., with the sole exception of the C grapheme for nasal codas usually romanised as n. This structure had some scholars label the system moraic instead of syllabic, because it requires the combination of two syllabograms to represent a CVC syllable with coda (i.e. CVn, CVm, CVng), a CVV syllable with complex nucleus (i.e. multiple or expressively long vowels), or a CCV syllable with complex onset (i.e. including a glide, CyV, CwV).

Kanał

Kanał (Polish pronunciation: [ˈkanaw], Sewer) is a 1956 Polish film directed by Andrzej Wajda. It was the first film made about the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, telling the story of a company of Home Army resistance fighters escaping the Nazi onslaught through the city's sewers. Kanał is the second film of Wajda's War Trilogy, preceded by A Generation and followed by Ashes and Diamonds.

The film was the winner of the Special Jury Award at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival.

Plot

It is 25 September 1944, during the last days of the Warsaw Uprising. Lieutenant Zadra leads a unit of 43 soldiers and civilians to a new position amidst the ruins of the now isolated southern Mokotów district of Warsaw.

The composer Michał manages to telephone his wife and child in another part of the city that is being overrun by the Germans. After a few words, she tells him that the Germans are clearing the building and that they are coming for her. Then the line goes dead. The next morning, 23-year-old Officer Cadet Korab apologizes after walking into a room to find the second in command, Lieutenant Mądry, and messenger girl Halinka in bed together (Halinka later reveals that Mądry is her first lover). A German attack is beaten off, but Korab is wounded while disabling a Goliath tracked mine.

Kana Software

KANA Software, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Verint Systems (NASDAQ: VRNT) and provides on-premises and cloud computing hosted customer engagement optimization (CEO) products to many of the Fortune 500, mid-market businesses and government agencies.

History

Mark Gainey founded KANA in 1996 to market a software package designed to help businesses manage email and Web-based communications. It grew around this core offering. In 1999, KANA Communications (as it was then known) acquired Connectify followed by Business Evolution and NetDialog. In 2000, KANA made its then-largest acquisition, Silknet Software. The purchase price was $4.2 billion, despite the fact that both companies were relatively small. Silknet was an early multichannel marketing software company. Industry analysts were generally cool to the purchase though some said it made sense strategically. In 2001, KANA merged with BroadBase software. KANA was a major stock market success during the dot-com bubble, and while it contracted significantly during the following downturn, it remained in business as an independent company through the following decade.