On Fri, 2006-11-17 at 10:12 +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote: > > not alphabets, but since they are short, you > > are correct that they are easily sorted with normal radix methods. > > That's why I didn't mention them. The question was about names, which > > are pretty much always written with Kanji in Japanese. > > I could be wrong; but I thought people were talking about dictionaries. > Those usually don't contain names... They were talking about telephone books, IIRC. > > > Katakana are satisfactory for all loan words; > > No, they are not. Almost all syllables in Japanese consist of a consonant > followed by a vowel; it is impossible to write down syllables that end > with a consonant (except, perhaps, if it ends with the consonant n, but > that's a special case). For example, it's impossible to write down your > name or mine with Japanese kana -- at least if it's to be pronounced > correctly. > > I'm aware that the Japanese usually write down a fair approximation for > foreign names in katakana, but sometimes that's not enough. A "loan word" is not the same thing as a foreign word, though the distinction is often missed. A loan word is a fairly new word in a language, which was "borrowed" from a different language. Loan words are created when the borrowed word undergoes two processes. First, it conforms to basic phonological patterns of the language it is borrowed into, and second, it exhibits a significant narrowing of its semantic domain. (Rarely it might exhibit an expansion.) It is called a loan word provided native speakers still feel a certain "foreignness" about it; if they stop feeling that, it often stops being called a loan word, though the boundary is anything but precise. A loan word in Japanese is then a word from a non-Japanese language which has been borrowed into Japanese, adopting basic Japanese phonological patterns and undergoing some significant semantic shift from its original language. Kana are perfectly satisfactory for *loan words*, though of course, not for genuinely foreign words. Thomas
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