Re: the name of Matz

Rick Denatale wrote:
One thing that Japanese has over English is VERY regular
pronunciation, there are a smallish number of syllables, and a 1-1
correspondence between each character from either hiragana or katakana
with the syllable it represents.

Such is also the case with the syllabic languages of India and
linguistically related parts of South East Asia. There is an exact one
to one mapping between syllables and sounds -- it sounds how it appears
and it's written how it sounds. Thus, there is no "hooked on phonics"
training from a young age. Furthermore, we do not have spelling bees in
our native languages because everyone would win! :)

IMHO, the primary benefit of such languages is not having to remember
how particular words are pronounced. Thus you have all this extra human
memory space (which would otherwise contain mappings from particular
words to sounds) that you can instead fill with vocabulary or poetry or
whatever.

Finally, it is said that the order of vowels in the Japanese alphabet
system is derived from that of Sanskrit. For instance, listed below are
the vowels from the South Indian Telugu language (the same vowels are
found in nearly all other Indian languages in exactly the same order).
The starred (*) vowels are found in Japanese (a i u e o).

start
-------------------
a (c[u]t) *
aa (say [aa]h)
i ([i]t) *
ii (f[ee]t)
u (fl[u]) *
uu (f[oo]d)
e (s[ay]) *
ee (th[ey]!!)
ai (l[ie])
o (g[o]) *
oo (cr[ow])
au (c[ow])
=================== # below are not really vowels, in the English sense
am (r[um])
ah (b[]uff)
-------------------
end

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