Re: Megami71

In article <V66dnf5dJKe5JYDZnZ2dnUVZ_umdnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxx>,
The Wanderer <inverseparadox@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Captain Nerd wrote:

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

Captain Nerd wrote:


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?

Straight ASCII. I selected "Compose as: Japanese" from the Edit
menu of this program for this and the previous reply. I assume it's
putting in the correct "interpret as" header.


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.

I see, you aren't interested in representing the actual Japanese
directly, you want to represent Japanese in some form of ASCII
text for your own purposes. I understand now.


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?

There is a "kana pallete" as part of the Kotoeri interface that lets
you click on a small kana vowel, "ャ", "ュ", "ョ" and "ッ", and it
inserts the character wherever your cursor is. There is a kana
pallete for both hiragana and katakana.

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 trailing "ツ" is used as an emphasis, similar to an exclamation
mark. To my knowledge it isn't pronounced nor does it affect the
pronunciation of the previous vowel.


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.

Except the pronunciation of the additional kana changes to the
vowel sound of the previous kana, thus "せんせい”the "い" is
now "え". *That* is what the teacher calls a "long" or "extended"
vowel.


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.)

Except when it comes to dealing with other translators and other
people who have learned the traditional methods. If you're only
dealing with yourself, you don't have to care about what others
do or the terminology they use.


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.

[snip]
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.

I would recommend a paper dictionary called "The Kanji Learner's
Dictionary" published by Kodansha. It's small, and doesn't require
either an Internet connection or electricity. You will have issues
with their romanization, though. They have several methods for
looking up kanji, from radicals to stroke count to on/kun
romanized pronunciation. It covers a bit more than 2200 of the
most used kanji, including kanji used for personal names.

http://tinyurl.com/pbqvr

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>

どういたしまして。 ^===^


(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?)

My style. I use a tab to differentiate my new text from the previous
text, since sometimes left justifiying reply text isn't as clearly
distinct from the "> " lines as I like. I've been doing it for so
many years (decades) that it's instinctive now.

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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