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Re: Debian etch



[Alas, mutt and emacs have conspired to mangle the japanese in the
quoting - it was fine when I was reading it]

On Sun, Jan 08, 2006 at 03:31:40AM +0900, Osamu Aoki wrote:
> > While it
> > would be strictly legal to use 'ecchi' as the pronunciation, there are
> > better choices, and nobody is going to be doing that unless they're
> > just being an arsehole - in which case you aren't going to stop
> > them.
> 
> Wow, I am one.  But I think most other Japanese do the same as me.

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.

> > I don't think there's really anything to see here. If we'd called it
> > "et'chy" (English doesn't have geminated stops - that's a pause in
> > there, like a glottal stop) then there might be, but we didn't.
> 
> As we know etch came from "etch a sketch".  The word "sketch" is commonly used
> imported English word in Japanese.
> 
> 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. I'm sure that means something really important
to the linguists].

> As I see on the web, the toy "Etch-a-Sketch" was translated as
> "?$B%(%C%A%"%9%1%C%A" by others.  So this seems quite normal translation.

Interesting. I guess that means there's no real issue here.

-- 
  .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
 : :' :  http://www.debian.org/ |
 `. `'                          |
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