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Reading manga, I came across this speech bubble:

I noticed the dakuten in ず is on the wrong side of the horizontal line, does this have some special meaning or is it just some sort of printing error? I went back to check earlier chapters and none of the other ず seem to be written this way.

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2 Answers 2

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Does this have some special meaning?

No. I've never encountered a dakuten with a special meaning.

... or is it just some sort of printing error?

A printing error in this case is unlikely. I think that it has to do with the font that they are using. Just as with English fonts, some characters change slightly, like with the lowercase 'a' in English. For example, the font on my computer puts the dakuten underneath the line on your question. (shown below)

enter image description here


Then, I changed the font, and I got a different result:

enter image description here


The moral of the story is you're noticing different font styles! For further information on why the font styles differ, look at the other answer.

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  • Oh yeah, I went to check the earlier chapters and at first It looked like all the dakuten were on top of the line but then I noticed that the font did slightly change in this chapter
    – Jinzal
    Jul 6, 2017 at 13:37
  • Huh, That's weird that they would change the font like that...
    – ajsmart
    Jul 6, 2017 at 13:39
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    @ajsmart Look how short the top part of the す is. They'd probably have to shrink it slightly to be seen and still be above the horizontal line. Its probably just a way to get the largest character that can fit inside the font box limits.
    – Andy
    Jul 6, 2017 at 17:10
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    @Andy Absolutely! That's why I think the other answer is better, but... yeah.
    – ajsmart
    Jul 6, 2017 at 17:17
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It depends on the type of font.

Basically Japanese fonts need to be used in vertical writing and horizontal writing, so unlike the alphabet, the space to design one character must be square.

When I check the given font, it is a very thick bold type. In order to arrange all of the design of a character ず in a square space given to a single character font, the designer of the font devised and changed the position of dakuten of ず.

This kind of change occurs generally for special font types. You can change the location of parts of a font especially dakuten and handakuten as far as you can identify them

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