Re: WW2 Island Hopping

Dennis <tsalagiNOSPAM@xxxxxxxx> writes:

Gernot Hassenpflug wrote:

Even in Japanese, the character has many readings, as its differing
meanings and/or shades of meanings are used to write many different
Japanese words. The character for 'fresh' with the main reading 'nama'
has over 27 different readings, and meanings encompassing such wide
concepts as 'life', 'fresh', 'to be born','original' and so on.

Do you mean that the character that is read 'nama' represents the
sound(s) 'nama' in longer words?

It can, depending what you define as a longer word. "nama" is a word,
so any longer word would be a word-combination, like "nama-kusai" (the
stink of something like fresh fish). Usually, a "longer word" means a
character compound though in Chinese/Japanese/Korean linguistics, and
so the character would usually be read in its Chinese manner ("sei" or
"jou", etc.). Example: "seikatsu" (life as in how you are making a
living at the present).

/../
Yes, Japanese is sound-poor, there are only 47 syllables, and
intonation is not used to separate meanings as in Chinese and
Vietnamese (Korean and Japanese are both tonal and the differences do
matter critically, but there are variations -- for instance Western
and Eastern Japan use virtually opposite conventions). So if one uses
only kana (pronounciation syllables, there is no alphabet in Japanese)
one has disambiguation of the many words that would be written with
the same syllables (a tonal differentiation would help but not resolve
the problem 100%, and since it is not standardized...) Romanization is
sort of like syllables but worse since there is no one-to-one
correspondence of the alphabet to the Japanese syllables.

??? I've never heard that Japanes is a tone language!!!! You do
have the distinction of vowel length; is that what you mean? That
frequently isn't written in romaji or kana but it can be.

No I mean that Japanese has high and low tones as well, but foreigners
are as far as I know never taught them, and in fact in many cases
actively told to ignore them. Partly that's because the standard
"hyoujungo" is not a real language but only an ideal for announcers,
and partly because Japanese for foreigners is in my opinion really
poorly taught.

You are right, the differing vowel lengths are difficult to
transliterate in romanji. Often they are not indicated at all, as in
Tokyo, where both "o" should be long, or Kyoto, where the first "o" is
long and the second short. Or by a "u" following the vowel, which is
the way post-WW2 Japanese is written in hiragana to announce a long
vowel. But confusing for Westerners obviously. IMO the best is to use
a bar over the vowel to indicate long sound (easy in typesetting
programs like LaTeX, UTF-8 capable editors, and some Word processors,
but not easily directly from the usual Western European keyboard).

In the above case, the issue is not disambiguation of meaning, but of
reading. The kanji are unambiguous w.r.t. meaning.

I don't understand. I've read that writing with kana or romaji
would be too ambiguous.

Yes. Kana, romanji is ambiguous because one does not know which
characters to put there and therefore has no idea what the meaning is:
there could be dozens of character compounds having a particular kana
or romanji equivalent. What I meant is that if you see two characters
and do not know the kana or romanji, you have to make a guess at these
(reading), so the characters can be ambiguous wrt reading but
unambiguous wrt meaning.

Um, if you have a link to the mistake, I'll try to explain it...I'll
look on the weekend, but since I'm getting married...!

Congratulations!

Thanks! Done! The neck ring feels a little tight but I'm told humans
are very adaptable.
--
Grrr!! ...Pick a reason...
.

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