Re: CHAT: F.L.O.E.S.

On Sun, Feb 22, 2004 at 08:19:36PM -0600, Axiem wrote:
> Oh, I know. I understand why they did some of the things they did in the
> romanization, I just don't like it. And it contributes to the horrible
> Japanese some people in the class have. I would prefer to simply read it as
> hiragana and katakana (since our book doesn't differentiate between the two
> in its romanization)
Is any distinction really needed?  I mean, yes, certain words tend to be
written in Hiragana and others as Katakana, but theoretically any word
can be written in either.  I guess most things are written in Hiragana, and
Katakana is used mostly for foreign borrowings, although I seem to
recall that it's also used for things like painting names on ships
because it's easier to read from a distance.

> > > "taberu n desu". I pronounce it, emulating my sensei as best I can, as
> > > [tabe4MndEs:] (forgiving my horrible IPAing)
> >
> > More like [tabe4Mn=dEs:]; the n is syllabic.
>
> My mistake in IPAing, then. Though I'm bad at syllabizing it in that
> situation.
As far as I can tell from listening to Japanese without being able to
understand it, syllabic 'n's often come out non-syllabic in normal rapid
speech, actually, so [tabe4MndEs:] is probably a correct pronunciation
even though it's phonemically /n=/.  I was just hypercorrecting, I
guess.

> Kepe in mind I don't understand vowel phonetics. I looked at my handy "chart
> of sounds in Japanese in IPA", figured out through comparing with the
> English chart which was which, and then looked up the CXS symbol for it. So
> I typed it as such. I may have made a mistake somewhere along the line.
>
> It's romanized as "u", though, if that helps any.
You were correct, it is /M/.

-Mark