is the "wa" in konnichiwa, konbanwa, a particle?

[WalterWills]

It's just that I often wondered why the japanese often spelled it "konnichiHA", and then I found out about how they use the letter for HA instead of WA.

However, is this wa = ha rule only for particles or for the whole language?

I feel quite embarrassed because I've written "hatashi ha" many times, and it might be wrong!


Thanks

[untmdsprt]

This is one reason why you need to learn hiragana.

は (ha) - used as a particle, but pronounced wa

わたしは (watashi wa)


へ (he) - used as a particle, but pronounced e

を (wo) - " " ", but pronounced o


I've actually seen some Japanese people type こんにちわ (konnichi wa)

[seanolan]

Both "こんにちは" and "こんばんは" use the particle は. In fact, while I cannot remember the archaic phrase, they each began greeting phrases in the past, and they started "This day..." and "this evening..." respectively. And "おやほうございます" literally translates to "it is early."

Sean

[jkeyz15]

Yes it is a particle, comes from an archaic greeting as mentioned above.

Also, the above mentioned meaning of "ohayou" as something like "it is early" is correct, and is also why おはよう is not sometimes used in cases other than morning.

[attwad]

I remember my teacher saying that こんにちは and こんばんは mean "about today ..." and "about tonight ..." that's a way to begin a conversation with someone but it's now become a simple word used in greetings.

はis used as a particule to introduce the "theme" of the sentence while わ is just a kana without proper meaning.

Hope it helped!

[Belton]

To slightly confuse things you can also see it written as こんにちわ　giving a girlish or cute impression. (You can see this in the manga よつばと！now and then friends of mine use it as well.)

Any Japanese (not a Japanese language teacher) I've met when writing romaji uses ha not wa , and wo not o to indicate the particles. They also have different ideas about where word breaks occur.

[Jason]

Lesson of the day: rouma-ji (for language learning purposes) is evil.

[WalterWills]

It certainly confuses things.
It's true about the word breaks too, I often see adjective + desu ne all as one word.