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Re: Question about historical Japanese kana usage.

From:Steven Williams <feurieaux@...>
Date:Sunday, November 7, 2004, 22:39
 --- 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?

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Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>