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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