Not used in running Chinese text in any region. It may be used as a shorthand, or to achieve visual, Japanese-style effect such as on signs, book titles, pamphlet covers or signboards, similar tofaux Cyrillic.
Some people with Japanese knowledge may also pronounce the symbol like in Japanese.
Thehiragana syllableの(no). Its equivalent inkatakana isノ(no). It is the twenty-fifth syllable in thegojūon order; its position isな行お段(na-gyō o-dan,“rowna, sectiono”).
FromOld Japaneseの(no2),[1][2] in turn fromProto-Japonic*nə. Appears in common use in theKojiki (712CE). Perhaps also cognate with*nə, an element found in some Old Korean place names spelled as 乃 and 仍.[3]
May be anapophonic form ofOld Japanese particleな(na). This other form also appears in a similar function. However, its usage was already restricted to certain set expressions by the time of the earliest Japanese texts in theNara period, with no clear examples of productive use.[1][2] These appears to be adjacent to the vowels /a/, /o/, or /u/, suggestingna was an assimilated version ofno.
In Old Japanese, there are three particles used productively to mark one noun modifying another:
の(no), as in倭の一本薄(Yamatono hitomoto susuki,“thesawtoothsedgeofYamato”,a line from one of the songs in theKojiki)
The apophonic formな(na) persisted only as an element in certain compounds, such as港(minato,“harbor”,generally parsed asmi “water” +na [possessive] +to “door,gate” →port,landing, harbor), or掌(tanagokoro,“palm of thehand”,parsed asta “hand” +na [possessive] +kokoro “heart,center”, changing togokoro due torendaku).
^Vovin, Alexander (2013), “From Koguryo to T'amna”, inKorean Linguistics[1], volume15, number 2 (PDF), John Benjamins Publishing Company,→DOI, pages222-240
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