On Mon, Jan 09, 2006 at 05:27:47PM +0900, Osamu Aoki wrote:
> Getting off-topic, excuse me but let me follow-up Andrew.
I don't think this thread has *ever* been on-topic :P
But hey, we may as well wring some modicum of interesting discussion
from it.
> 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}
[Except that there is not and has never been a yi, ye, or wu, and some
of the others are now obsolete, for those of you following along at home]
> 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.
Although the literal translation is 'Hebon', most English speakers
would know it better as 'Hepburn' (after the guy who invented it).
> "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.
Yeah, that was my guess too... but I'm no linguist, and I don't know
much about the history of the language. This thing about historically
using -i instead of -u is new to me, and makes me somewhat less sure
of the reason. Unfortunately I don't know any linguists who study
Japanese.
> 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
Yeah, I can read it in 2022-jp, but I'm not set up to write in it
(some locale problem, I think) and for some unknown reason mutt and
emacs both refused to transcode it into utf-8 when replying. I haven't
been able to puzzle out which of them is broken.
> [*] 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)
Wow, how weird. Here edict really shows its inadequecy - it claims
they're the same word. I wonder if there's a reference dictionary for
these that doesn't suck...
--
.''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
: :' : http://www.debian.org/ |
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