Re: Megami71

Captain Nerd wrote:

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:

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.

It's working fine so far as I can see. Out of curiosity, what were you
using before?

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.

<shrug> Very well. I've never heard the noun "glide" in anything like
this context before, so I apparently have no idea what you'rea actually
referring to; however, since the "ri" vs. "li" bit is completely
unrelated to what I was talking about I concluded that the answer to
your question was "no".

(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

Then that's not precisely "representation" in the sense I was talking
about, is it? I'm talking about representing kana in romaji, not about
font issues.

I'm not really sure what you're trying to get at, here.

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.

It comes out just fine. This does answer one small part of the question
I'd asked, but it does not satisfy me that the system you're using will
be able to arbitrarily produce the characters desired; if you wanted to
write *just* the ァ, without having to have it be next to any specific
predefined other kana, does the romaji you're using for entry provide
any way to do that short of copy-and-paste from a longer string?

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".

True enough, but since it also has a discernible effect when appearing
in a place which is *not* followed by any consonant (i.e. at the end of
a sentence - I've seen it used that way), and since it does seem to fit
in the more common instance for reasons whose examples escape me for the
moment (and I can't take too long thinking since I have to work again
this afternoon), I refer to them usually as "vowel extenders". To my
ear, the effect of the character *is* on the preceding vowel, not on the
following consonant - to the limited extent to which it bears any
relationship to either.

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".

I've rarely been able to get the faintest idea why that sort of
occurrence is not simply treated as "the additional vowel う occurs at
this point", since the sound matches that explanation equally well for
at least virtually and perhaps actually every example I've ever come
across.

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.

Acknowledged - I've done a few similar things in my time. That doesn't
mean that I necessarily pay one whit of attention to them *outside* of
class, however.

(As for the other bit - terminology is terminology, I work with what
makes sense to me, and the issue of what the small 'tsu' and the like
are called is a digression anyway.)

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 believe I am, yes. It's been some time since I tried it, but that name
does ring a bell.

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.

They probably are fairly useful, once you have a handle on figuring out
the stroke order/count/etc. of a given unfamiliar kanji just from
looking at it. However, I've never had an opportunity to learn the
fundamentals of such things, so I go without them; it probably does
handicap me, but I manage well enough despite that most of the time.

I do *all* of my Japanese lookup with one of JEDI (now defunct), WWWJDIC (primarily for longer sections, which happened to appear in a
copy-and-pasteable form, when I'm feeling lazy), or kdrill; in practice,
since so little of what I need to look up is kana (and most of what *is*
kana isn't easily searched on), I use kdrill almost exclusively. Its
radical search feature is powerful enough to get me by, although I do
run up against its limitations from time to time. I've gotten fairly
good at identifying 'component radicals' in most types of kanji,
although there are still extensive problems in that direction.

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.

Regardless, it is mainly the thought that counts; I do thank you for
that. <grin>

(Random question, purely from curiosity since it doesn't actually
interfere with anything: is there any particular reason why your posts
have the new text indented by so many spaces after every newline?)

--
The Wanderer

Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.
.

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