Re: Question about historical Japanese kana usage.

 --- Muke Tever <hotblack@...> skrev:
> "en" apparently used to be "wen", not "yen".  "Yen"
> is an artifact of an old system of Romanization that
> spelled "e" initially as "ye" (and, I suspect after
> vowels as well, as in the surname "Inouye").
Makes sense. Sort of like Pinyin and many other
transliteration systems for Mandarin requiring 'yi'
and 'wu' for initial [i] and [u] (according to
Omniglot). So, I suspect 'yen' is somehow
etymologically equivalent to Mandarin 'yuan' [HEn_R].
Am I right?

Reply