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Re: Whatever happened to Aelya?

From:Tim May <butsuri@...>
Date:Monday, April 15, 2002, 6:50
Nik Taylor writes:
 > Aidan Grey wrote:
 > > I think the romanization of japanese with geminate letters
 > > (chotto, for example) is a good example, since the native script actually
 > > uses a small 'tsu'.
 >
 > On the other hand, some people *do* use - or ~ to represent the
 > long-vowel mark in Japanese, writing things like konpyu-ta or de-to.

Note, however, that;

a) In Japanese, the, uh, "long vowel mark" (I don't know the Japanese
name) is only used when writing in Katakana (as standard).  In
Hiragana, you double the vowel, or use a "i" after "e" or (mostly) "u"
after "o".  I don't know whether people make this distinction when
using -.

b) - or ~ could be just as easily taken to represent the macron used
to lengthen the vowel in most romanization schemes, which can't be
entered in plain ASCII, etc.  So it's not necessarily a duplication of
the native orthography, unless people do make a distinction between
words which would be written in hiragana and those which would be
written in katakana.

Reply

Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>