Re: Megami71

In article <9KidncaG8azoZYHZnZ2dnUVZ_tidnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxx>,
The Wanderer <inverseparadox@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Captain Nerd wrote:

In article <-NudnRt9xcAa_YHZnZ2dnUVZ_tudnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxx>, The
Wanderer <inverseparadox@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Captain Nerd wrote:

I don't know if an equivalent method exists in Windows (surely it
must)

I believe it does, but I wouldn't know for certain.

but MacOS Japanese language support lets you switch between
Hiragana, Katakana and Romaji text processing. On text input you
type in romaji and it automatically converts to the equivalent
kana in whatever text window you're typing in.

But in *what* romaji? Some schemes out there are Very Close to what
I use by habit, but none I've encountered is quite the same, and
(more importantly) none will reliably let me enter, say, a small あ
- and I've wanted to do that on more than one occasion. I've never
seen any romanization system but my own which provides a clear,
unambiguous means of representing all such small characters.

(I'll just note that the kana I entered above came out garbled when you
quoted it - no matter which encoding I view the message in, it does not
look like the correct kana character. My messages are being sent in
UTF-8; are you able to view them correctly?)

I had to change encoding schemes, and I'm not sure this is going to
work.


Are you talking about entering glides? They're automatic in MacOS.
If you type either "ri" or "li" it creates the same kana. I would
have to see examples of what you mean by your personal "scheme" so I
could see how MacOS interprets them.

No, I'm talking about entering the 'small' versions of the normal kana -
the most famous of which is the small 'tsu' which serves as a vowel
extender. In my romanization scheme, such characters are represented
simply by enclosing the representation of the larger character in
reverse angle brackets.

My textbook covers them under the same category as "glides", which
is why I refer to them as such.


(I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "see how MacOS interprets them",
so I may not be answering the question you're asking, but an example or
two are below after a few basic notes.)

I represent hiragana with lowercase and katakana with uppercase. I
represent the ん character with "n^", so that if it is followed by a
vowel it is obvious that the two are not part of the same character.

I found the name of the package that Apple calls their Japanese
input, "Koeteri" based on a custom package written some years
ago by another company. Hiragana are represented by hiragana
font, and katakana by katakana font.

あかさた vs. アカサタ

Take the romaji HU>A<IRU, corresponding to the katakana ファイル
phonetically, the English word "file". The second character, ァ, serves
to modify the vowel sound of the preceding フ; this is the standard
means of writing in kana words which begin with what in English would be
an "F" or "PH" sound. I obtained the above kana by searching for the
word "file" in WWWJDIC, then doing a copy-and-paste; I know of no
romanization scheme other than my own which has any means of clearly
representing such 'small' characters. A few would render the above as
"fairu", automatically converting from the fact that it uses "fa" rather
than "ha" to the two-character sequence, but I think that's a little
awkward and in any case it gives you two different romaji sequences
which the kana フ could correspond to - either a "hu" or a "f" - which
is inconsistent with one of my goals.

Typing "fairu" yields ファイル in this window, using the katakana font
on my Mac. Not sure how your font will represent these characters.


For a hiragana example, take "ya'pari" or "ya>tsu<pari" (I use both
forms at various times, although I prefer the latter except when
convenience is more important than rigid precision), corresponding to
やっぱり. The second character, っ, is the familiar small 'tsu' which I
mentioned above which serves as a vowel extender; most romanization
schemes I know of would render this as "yappari", and although that is
imprecise in cases where the following kana is from the な gyo, I am
reasonably comfortable using it myself when need be.

My Japanese (native) teacher refers to it as a "consonant doubler"
for the following consonant sound. It isn't quite a glottal stop but
it is a stop and an extension of the beginning consonant of the next
kana. At least, that's how she says it and how she taught us to
use it. In your example, the "ya" would still be as short as usual,
but there is a beat while holding the "p" in "pa". A "vowel
extender" would be something like the "う" following any kana with
a trailing "o", as in "どうも" which adds a beat to the "o" in "do".

Bear in mind, I have to pay attention to what my teacher says, and
how she says it, if I want to pass my classes. そして、先生は日本
人です。I defer to her judgement.

I do have access to a Mac - my parents both run them, as does a somewhat
loose friend of mine - and I may see about giving this a try at some
point, but it is not enough for me to switch away from Linux over.
I've used a program (for Linux, meaning it should run fine on recent
Macs) which promises to let you identify (and, I believe, copy and
paste) a desired kanji based on what you draw in its image window;
unfortunately, I was never able to get any practical use out of it,
since it virtually never came up with the kanji I was looking for even
in the simplest cases; it recently occurred to me that it may have
required that you actually write the kanji *correctly*, i.e. with
correct stroke order and so forth, which is rather beyond me as I've not
succesfully rendered even a basic kana in more than five years and have
absolutely zero knowledge of stroke order or even stroke counts.

Are you referring to "kanjipad"? I just downloaded the source
today, and have been banging my head trying to get all the dependent
source libraries built and installed. It does rely on stroke order
to determine the correct candidate kanji. Stroke order is one of
the main things my teacher has stressed from day one, both for
kana and especially for kanji. Since knowing stroke orders helps in
identifying kanji in various dictionaries I've used, it's suprising
you haven't needed to learn them. I find them an incredibly
useful way of remembering the kanji, especially finding the
radicals when looking up unfamiliar kanji.

Obviously, you are pursuing a direction that I am not, so I won't
be able to contribute anything more to helping with your problem.
I've passed along what help I could, which apparently isn't much
at all, if any.

Cap.

--
Since 1989, recycling old jokes, cliches, and bad puns, one Usenet
post at a time!
Operation: Nerdwatch http://www.nerdwatch.com
Only email with "TO_CAP" somewhere in the subject has a chance of being read
.

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