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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 to faux Cyrillic.
The hiragana syllable の(no). Its equivalent in katakana is ノ(no). It is the twenty-fifth syllable in the gojūon order; its position is な行お段(na-gyō o-dan, “row na, section o”).
From Old Japaneseの(no2),[1][2] in turn from Proto-Japonic*nə. Appears in common use in the Kojiki (712 CE). Perhaps also cognate with *nə, an element found in some Old Korean place names spelled as 乃 and 仍.[3]
May be an apophonic form of Old 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 the Nara period, with no clear examples of productive use.[1][2] These appears to be adjacent to the vowels /a/, /o/, or /u/, suggesting na was an assimilated version of no.
In Old Japanese, there are three particles used productively to mark one noun modifying another:
の(no), as in 倭の一本薄(Yamato no hitomoto susuki, “the sawtoothsedgeofYamato”, a line from one of the songs in the Kojiki)
The apophonic form な(na) persisted only as an element in certain compounds, such as 港(minato, “harbor”, generally parsed as mi “water” + na + to “door, gate” → port, landing, harbor), or 掌(tanagokoro, “palm of the hand”, parsed as ta “hand” + na + kokoro “heart, center”, changing to gokoro due to rendaku).
^ Vovin, Alexander (2013) “From Koguryo to T'amna”, in Korean Linguistics, volume 15, number 2 (PDF), John Benjamins Publishing Company, →DOI, pages 222-240