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are kana suffixes following kanji stems in Japanese written words. They serve two purposes: to inflect adjectives and verbs, and to force a particular kanji to mean a specific idea and be read a certain way. For example, the non-past verb form 見る (''miru'', "see") inflects to past tense 見た (''mita'', "saw"), where 見 is the kanji stem, and る and た are okurigana, written in hiragana script. With a very few exceptions,〔Examples of exceptions are the verbs 皮肉る, 牛耳る and 退治る.〕 okurigana are only used for kun'yomi (native Japanese readings), not for on'yomi (Chinese readings) – Chinese morphemes do not inflect in Japanese,〔Verbs with Chinese roots are instead formed by appending する (''suru,'' to do), or occasionally variant forms such as じる (''jiru''), and only the する, which is a separate word, inflects.〕 and their pronunciation is inferred from context, since many are used as parts of compound words (kango). When used to inflect an adjective or verb, okurigana can indicate aspect (perfective versus imperfective), affirmative or negative meaning, or grammatical politeness, among many other functions. In modern usage, okurigana are almost invariably written with hiragana; katakana were also commonly used in the past. == English analogs == Analogous orthographic conventions find occasional use in English, which, being more familiar, help in understanding okurigana. As an inflection example, when writing ''Xing'' for ''cross-ing,'' as in ''Ped Xing'' (pedestrian crossing), the ''-ing'' is a verb suffix, while ''cross'' is the dictionary form of the verb – in this case ''cross'' is the reading of the character ''X,'' while ''-ing'' is analogous to okurigana. By contrast, in the noun ''Xmas'' for ''Christmas,'' the character ''Χ'' is instead read as ''Christ'' (it is actually a chi in origin, from the Greek Χριστός, ''Khristós''). The suffixes serve as phonetic complements to indicate which reading to use. Another common example is in ordinal and cardinal numbers – "1" is read as ''one,'' while "1st" is read as ''fir-st''. Note that word, morpheme (constituent part of word), and reading may be distinct: in "1", "one" is at once the word, the morpheme, and the reading, while in "1st", the word and the morpheme are "first", while the ''reading'' is ''fir,'' as the ''-st'' is written separately, and in "Xmas" the word is "Christmas" while the morphemes are ''Christ'' and ''-mas,'' and the reading "Christ" coincides with the first morpheme. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Okurigana」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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