Re: "My name is spelled with..."

The Wanderer wrote:
On 09/01/2009 02:16 PM, Doug Jacobs wrote:

Jim diGriz <jimdigriz@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

One has a rising tone while the other has a falling tone. Except in
Kansai-ben where it is the other way round. I can never remember
which is which but the wwwjdic now has a flash player that plays
the actual word spoken if you click on the funny button right next
to the word.

Japanese really doesn't have tones, and in most cases the context
would make it clear what you're talking about...unless you're trying
to say "I forgot my chopsticks on the edge of the Hashi bridge."
(Ara...hashibashi no hashi ni, hashi o, wassurechatta!)

My favorite expression of this nature is something I ran across in
someone's .sig quite some years ago, about the reason why the Japanese
use kanji instead of kana.

Written in pure, undifferentiated romaji, it would be

niwanoniwaniwaniwaniwatoriwaniwakaniwaniwotabeta

(with slight variation depending on your romanization scheme), which is
plainly unintelligible.

In slightly more comprehensible romaji, it can be written as

NIWAnoniwanihaniwaniwatorihaniwakaniwaniwotabeta

which is somewhat better, but still more or less incomprehensible.

In kana, it would be something like

ニワのにわにはにわにわとりはにわかにわにをたべた

which is better than the first romaji case but more or less identical to
the second. Either of the last two would be much easier to understand
with spaces between the words, but Japanese writing very often doesn't
use those - and, because several of the words begin with the exact same
syllables and in fact two of them consist only of those syllables, it
would still be ambiguous.

In kanji, as best I've been able to express it based on the translation
given in that .sig, it would be written as

ニワの庭には二羽鶏は俄に鰐を食べた

which is utterly incomprehensible if you don't understand the kanji, but
is completely free of the repetition which makes the kana and romaji
versions so hard to parse.

Ten points to anyone who can provide an accurate English translation
without having seen this one before. Fifty points if you can do it
without needing to rely on the kanji version. (Over 9000 points and a
"how the *** did you manage that?" if you can do it based only on the
topmost, undifferentiated romaji version.)



Just to give everyone a laugh: If your garden is altogether full of alligators, it's kind of hard to raise chickens.

How's that? Do I get a booby prize? ^__^:

Inu-Yasha
Feh!! ^_^

It's terrible what one idiot can do with a Japanese dictionary.

.