Getting off-topic, excuse me but let me follow-up Andrew.
On Sun, Jan 08, 2006 at 01:37:38AM +0000, Andrew Suffield wrote:
> Curious. But I've since found a paper which observes that, for no
> apparent reason, the 'ch' sound in English tends to map onto an -i
> ending rather than the -u which most of the other 'sharp' consonants
> tend to get... interesting oddity.
Indeed. I just thought about the rationale behind why I use "i" to
supplement a missing vowel for this case. (Japanese has to end with the
vowel in writing (except "n") although their sounds are very faint).
Japanese used to use "i" instead of "u" for missing vowels in early 20th
century and we still have some imported words containing "i" at the
end.[*] But this is not the case for this "ch" case, I think.
50 basic sounds of Japanese are spelled as
{(null),k,s,t,n,h,m,y,r,w}*{a,i,u,e,o}
in Educational ministry spelling system which follows logic of Japanese
perception of sound groups and taught in Japanese school system. There
is an alternative spelling system called Hebon-system which is based on
transcribed sound of Japanese by the English speaker and promoted by
Foreign ministry for use in Japanese passport etc. When you compare
these 2 spelling system, you should notice following deviation within
this 50 sounds.
Ed. Hebon.
si --> shi
ti --> chi
tu --> tsu
hu --> fu
(And there are more differences outside of 50 sounds.)
This illustrates singular points of the Japanese phonetic system.
"t" endings are usually supplemented by "o" because there is no "tu" nor
"ti" sounds within normal Japanese text.
Also, within this basic 50 sound table, "ch" appears only as "chi".
I hope you find the rationale behind association of "ch" to "chi" in the
above facts.
> > sketch = ?$B%9%1%C%A ; ?$B%1=ke
> > etch = ?$B%(%C%A ; ?$B%(=e
> >
> > So we put glottal indicator ?$B%C with reason :-)
>
> [Technically, when you use a sokuon as a consonant prefix, it's a
> geminate indicator; it's only a glottal when it comes at the *end* of
> a sentence or phrase.
You foreign language learner tends to be more precise with these
linguistic terminology :-) I was just a TA for Japanese 101 while as
Engineering grad student without linguistic training.
> I'm sure that means something really important
> to the linguists].
Yep.
Oh, as for mangled text above with ? which should have been escape code
or something, I think this is encoding issue. I sent my main with most
common 7 bit encoding:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-2022-jp
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
This happened because I use UTF-8 environment with mutt and my mutt
setting automatically switch encoding when it sees non-ASCII characters.
I used to use UTF-8 for those case but I was told to use iso-2022-jp if
it is just Japanese since old Japanese clients can not cope with other
encodings such as UTF-8.
Osamu
---
[*] Japanese used to supplement -i instead of -u in early 20th century
per my non-specialist understanding. This can be observed with
following example of 2 imported words from a single original English
word.
strike -> sutoraiku (Baseball usage)
strike -> sutoraiki (Labor union usage)
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