I continue to squander my resources for advancing in Japanese by instead obsessing over useless trivia... Please forgive me.

OK, the official line is that katakana is used for loan words (when the loan does not come from China, that is), and occasionally as a stylistic device to convey emphasis, similar to the use of ALL CAPS in English.

But there are a few words that sound very Yamato-grade purebred Japanese to me, but are routinely written in katakana (so the "added emphasis" explanation given above is hard to justify). For example if you search on Google for the word for frog, "かえる" (even if you search term is in hiragana like this), you'll see that the very top hit is the Japanese Wikipedia for "カエル". Same thing goes for "ばら" (rose) and "いちご" (strawberry): their top Google hits are the Japanese Wikipedia pages for "バラ" and "イチゴ", respectively.

What's going on here? And what's the standard orthographic rule that would explain this observation?

Names of plants and animals are normally written in katakana. There are a few exceptions for very common ones, and in general I think the more "everyday" the name is the more likely you would see some people write it in hiragana (or kanji).

And yeah, you're never going to reach Yonosa's god-like ability if you keep wasting your time asking these questions.

Yeah, when I look at these, it seems like more of the "these kanji aren't used" thread
蛙、カエル
薔薇、バラ
苺、イチゴ (not that weird, but whatever)

also,
蛸、タコ
凧、タコ
鮭、サケ／シャケ
etc...

why they're not hiragana, however, beats me

This is mostly simply a case of language taking the path of least resistance. Many plant and animal names involve complex and uncommon kanji, and the words themself occur so infrequently in everyday use that learning to write and read them is simply not worth the time and effort for the general public.

薔薇 (バラ）for example, is commonly considered a very difficult character to write, so much that famously when interviewed on a TV program about whom they wanted to marry, the person responded, "I want to mary someone who can write 'bara' in kanji!"

麒麟（キリン) uses two very rare kanji that I don't even know of existing in any other words except names.

Despite katakana being overwhelmingly the most common form for writing many plant/animal names, the kanji forms will still creep up from time to time. In those situations furigana will almost always be provided though. Words like "donkey" simply aren't used enough in the language to merit the average Japanese person learning their kanji forms
However, the rarity is going to vary between each word. The average person may not be able to write 薔薇, but everyone can still read it. Knowing how rare a certain form of a word is just takes exposure and time, but if you want to stay on the side caution just use this rule of thumb: If you go to write the word in kanji and your hand is screaming, "noooo, don't make me! please, anything but that! I'm too young to die!" then likely it's too complex of a kanji word for most Japanese to bother with and the katakana is best.

Of course that leaves the question of why katakana over hiragana unanswered. Honestly I doubt there's any published research tracing back the exact origins of this practice.

I have the feeling that the majority of japanese (and also many kanji learners on this forum) will write 薔薇 perfectly, just because it is so well-known as an archetypic example of difficult and rare kanji.

Asriel Wrote:...also,
蛸、タコ
凧、タコ
鮭、サケ／シャケ
etc...

And ネコ = 猫 too (Google: ネコ 49.2M vs. ねこ 44.8M) .

Quote:...why they're not hiragana, however, beats me

Yeah, that's the big mystery (not the kana-over-kanji one).

gfb345 Wrote:

Quote:...why they're not hiragana, however, beats me

Yeah, that's the big mystery (not the kana-over-kanji one).

Why is it a mystery? Because some textbook (or whatever the "official line" is) told you that katakana is for writing foreign words and ALL CAPS words?

JimmySeal Wrote:

gfb345 Wrote:

Quote:...why they're not hiragana, however, beats me

Yeah, that's the big mystery (not the kana-over-kanji one).

Why is it a mystery? Because some textbook (or whatever the "official line" is) told you that katakana is for writing foreign words and ALL CAPS words?

You go tiger! grrr!

I remember hearing somewhere that animal and plant names are italicized because they are a kind of taxonomic words. In English we write animal and plant names in italics AND Latin-style to show that they are part of a scientific classification.

Now according to wikipedia, the actual Japanese scientific name for frog is 無尾目 not カエル, but I'm guessing that at some point in the development of the Japanese language the naming of animals and plants was considered a scientific/techincal endeavor whose product was worth being set off from the rest of the text.