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

From:Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
Date:Monday, February 23, 2004, 2:37
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