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In "Maiko Haaaan!!!", a bridge going over Yumekawa (a fictional river in
Kyoto) apparently has "夢ノ橋" written on it, rather than "夢の橋". I had two
theories about why that may be the case. One was that it was the name of
something, and therefore might have different rules than normal Japanese, and
the other was that the bridge was supposed to be old, and therefore the name
was written in a Japanese different to what exists today.

I checked "When is the katakana form of wo (ヲ) used?", and [this
answer](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/761/91) seemed the best match to
the circumstances:

> The use of katakana ヲ is quite rare indeed; as you surmise, the use as a
> particle is Hiragana in modern Japanese. In older dialects, Katakana was
> used for particles as well, however, and you can see ヲ in use there. In
> modern times, it's also occasionally used for ironic or stylistic purposes,
> such as in ヲタク.

Was の one of the particles that was sometimes written in katakana?

(Appearance of the bridge name: [夢ノ橋](http://youtu.be/i97zHb88JWI?t=17s) (18
seconds into the youtube clip), and ノ appears in a non-fictional bridge
[梅ノ橋](http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/noppo0935/17444136.html))
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question
history katakana particle-の manyōgana
Was the の particle sometimes written in katakana?
I presume this habit stems from times, when Japanese was written in 漢文. To
make sure that 夢橋 is read with the Japanese reading, you would write a ノ in
the column, resulting in 夢ノ橋 read as ゆめのはし. You would never read that as
むのきょう, whereas 夢橋 could be read as either ゆめばし or むきょう. The only reason for
the ノ being written in カタカナ is that annotations were customarily done all in
カタカナ. (This is really the origin of カタカナ—annotations in margins, which were
done with [万葉仮名]{まんようがな} were simplified to カタカナ.)

Good typography respects the origin of the ノ as a margin note and typesets the
ノ smaller, like a small つ, や, etc. But since that can't be achieved on the
computer, yet (there is no Unicode for a small ノ, only for ヶッャュョ), the ノ is
just a standard-size ノ. There is also
[[御茶ノ水]{おちゃのみず}](http://30min.jp/image_proxy%3Furl%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fstat.ameba.jp%252Fuser_images%252F20100702%252F08%252Fnatsugou%252F3f%252Fd7%252Fj%252Fo0560042010619260491.jpg),
a JR/Tokyo Metro station in central Tokyo, and also the circle line
[山ノ手]{やまのて}線 is (or was) sometimes written with a (small) ノ.
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answer