Posted under General
That was just an example I pulled off the top of my head for tags using apostrophes. As for the actual tag? -- I didn't exactly come up with it, but sure, I agreed it was useable. Haphazardly translated? -- I have to say I totally agree with that too. But we've had worse memes.
Is the apostrophe in kikou_sen'nyo_rouran superfluous?
0xCCBA696 said:
Lalaca: Ugh... haphazardly translated memes... *shudder*
I don't really see a problem with it. And I think it's considerably better than the previous name (see forum #30364).
zatchii: Yes, it is, because in native Japanese words you will never find a 促音 followed by a mora starting with n (such as っにょ).
Lalaca: I just kind of balk at most of these memes because I first knew them by their japanese forms... take it home as おもちかえり, just as planned as 計画通り, they're not panties as パンツじゃないから恥ずかしくないもん, etc. etc.
Edited kikou_sen'nyo_rouran -> kikou_sennyo_rouran. The rest of the current *n'* tags look correct to me.
A lot of the *nichi* tags are potential candidates for apostrophisation. Does this affect any popular character tags? That's usually when people start complaining.
On the translated memes, I take it case by case. pantsu_jya_nai_kara_hazukashikunai_mon (or however the bits would be spaced, that's one tricky aspect of romanization I never got a perfect grasp of) is a pretty daunting tag, as is a full translation. they're_not_panties was a compromise purely based on practicality and the fact that it's readily apparent what it refers to if you've seen Strike Witches or any of the parodies. I think it's a good tag.
just_as_planned and keikaku_doori are both widely known and equally easy to type. It's also an accurate translation. I don't see one being terribly superior to the other.
omochikaeri I do prefer to take_it_home, personally. But I don't care a lot either way.
葉月 said:
As for spacing, it's essentially arbitrary.
I wish it wasn't. Perhaps then I could make a case for utawarerumono becoming utawareru_mono.
葉月 said: *Ahem*. "ja", not "jya". As for spacing, it's essentially arbitrary.
Yeah, I almost always use ja, though many times I do wish it weren't, for whatever reason, handled differently from [almost?] all other Xゃ combinations (hya, kya, gya, bya, mya, etc). Putting aside obvious exceptions like cha and sha.
jxh2154 said:
many times I do wish it weren't, for whatever reason, handled differently from [almost?] all other Xゃ combinations (hya, kya, gya, bya, mya, etc). Putting aside obvious exceptions like cha and sha.
Um. My limited knowledge of Japanese phonology combined with a general linguistics point of view:
The youon hiragana series represent syllables combining a palatal consonant and a vowel. In English-based systems, the palatal aspect is generally represented by adding a y letter (hya etc.). This is because English itself has no established means of marking palatality.
Japanese palatal sibilant (s-type) or affricate (ts-type) phonemes either are, or at least sound much like, postalveolar sibilants and affricates. Since English does have established means of marking postalveolarity, closely matching English letters and digraphs are used as such for the romanization of these phonemes. It so happens, for historical reasons, that adding the letter h is used as the postalveolar marker in English; the only exception is j, which marks a postalveolar affricate as such.
The Hepburn and (as far as I know it) waapuro romanizations try to be concise; when an extra y is not necessarily needed, it is dropped. Hence j just as well as ch.
On the other hand, there seem to be systems that build heavily on the hiragana logic. They may use such non-phonological yet logical forms as tibi, tubasa, and ninzya.
Apparently, jya is a compromise between phonological ja and transliterational zya.
Sorry for the long off-topic rant. In case I used too difficult terminology, I will gladly provide Wikipedia links or short explanations.
Katajanmarja said:
The Hepburn and (as far as I know it) waapuro romanizations try to be concise; when an extra y is not necessarily needed, it is dropped. Hence j just as well as ch.
That's pretty much it.
A layman's way of thinking about it, at least in regarding "ja" versus "jya", would be to just see it as the "ja" in a word such as "jar".
Katajanmarja said:
The youon hiragana series represent syllables combining a palatal consonant and a vowel.
Going by a phonemic rather than a phonetic analysis, Japanese doesn't have palatal consonants. Rather, one stipulates a phonological process that palatalizes alveolar consonants preceding a close front vowel (/i/, i). Thus /si/ is realized as [ɕi], /zi/ is realized as [ʑi] (or [d͡ʑi] because of allophony between [z] and [d͡ʑ]).
This analysis is very natural (and is also the one found on wikipedia) because it perfectly accounts for the complementary distributions of [s] and [ɕ], [z] and [ʑ], [t] and [t͡s], and [d] and [d͡z] -- the former are never found before [i] or [j], and the latter always found before [i] or [j]. (Note that postconsonantal [j], as in 拗音, is usually analyzed as palatalization of the consonant, and [z] and [d͡z] are generally considered allophonic in most situations.)
A 拗音 construction is a "standard" mora (i.e. one represented by a single 仮名) with the consonant palatalized. For understandable phonotactic reasons, this is generally only allowed when the moraic vowel is not too close or front, i.e. is /o/, /a/, or /u/. There is no restriction on the consonant, so we can have e.g. にゃ, ぎょ, じゅ, ぴょ, りゃ, みゅ, etc. etc.
Since 拗音 are plainly a construction from "simpler" morae, they are considered "complex" morae, and the orthography (仮名, that is) reflects that by representing them, conveniently, as two characters, or maybe "1.5" characters.
As you mentioned, Hepburn takes a cue from English orthography when dealing with 拗音 or any other morae. In Hepburn, 「きゃ」 becomes "kya": "きゃ" is realized phonetically as [kʲa], which is close to /kja/, and in English, "k" stands for /k/, "y" can stand for /j/, and "a" can stand for /a/. Similarly, ち becomes "chi", because in English, "ch" usually stands for /t͡ʃ/ and "i" can stand for "iː". ち is realized phonetically as [t͡ɕi], which is not that close to [t͡ʃi:], but it's the closest that the English phonemic inventory can supply.
In a more notable case, じゃ, with phonetic realization [d͡ʑʲa], becomes "j" + "a", because in English, "j" usually represents a voiced postalveolar affricate, [d͡ʒ], which is a sound close to the Japanese "palatalized" alveolo-palatal affricate, [d͡ʑʲ]; and in English, "a" can represent [a], which is also the sound in "じゃ". Because in phonetic realization, a palatalized alveolo-palatal consonant doesn't sound much different from the original alveolo-palatal consonant, no "y" is inserted into the transcription, as it would be in the case of, say, きゃ -> "kya", above.
In Nihonsiki and other similar systems, however, which are phonemically based (not phonetically), two of the transcriptions above would be different. First, ち would be "ti", because the phone [t͡ɕ] is analyzed as an allophone of the phoneme /t/ caused by palatalization conditioned by the subsequent /i/. Second, じゃ would be "zya", because the phone group [d͡ʑʲa] is analyzed as /zʲa/ through two phonological processes: one, allophony between [d͡z] and [z], and two, allophony between [ʑ] and [z] conditioned by palatalization.
Note that both systems attempt to match English (or other general Latin-based languages') pronunciation to Japanese; Hepburn tries to match phones, while Nihonsiki tries to match phonemes. As it happens, since 仮名 is phonemically rather than phonetically based, Nihonsiki-like romanizations also happen to correspond more "logically" to 仮名 spelling of Japanese.
Indeed, you mentioned that:
Katajanmarja said:
On the other hand, there seem to be systems that build heavily on the hiragana logic. They may use such non-phonological yet logical forms as tibi, tubasa, and ninzya.Apparently, jya is a compromise between phonological ja and transliterational zya.
Emphasis mine.
Those "systems that build heavily on the hiragana logic"* are not "transliterational as opposed to phonological". Rather, they are both transliterationally and phonologically based, in that they provide ultimately simple rules for transliteration from the native orthography (仮名) to the Roman script, as well as correspond directly to the phonology of the language, as detailed above. This is possible since the native orthography itself is a shallow one. So you could term these systems, such as Nihon-siki and Kunrei-siki, as "phonemic transcriptions".
The Hepburn romanization is phonetic. It works by transcribing the pronunciation of Japanese relatively narrowly and then romanizing it using approximately English graphemes (though those are shared by many European languages).
I've only demonstrated one of the ways in which Hepburn imitates a narrow, phonetic transcription and Nihonsiki et al. imitate a broad, phonemic transcription, but there are many others (such as treatment of 王 and 追う, etc.) Wa-puro romanization is a compromise between the two approaches -- in fact, most wa-puro input systems will recognize Nihonsiki or some macron-less version of Hepburn-shiki equally well.
Sorry, that was even more off-topic, and even more of a rant, but hopefully you'll forgive me :)
*By the way, "to build heavily on" something means to extend it far beyond its original scope. Here, I think you mean that the systems are heavily based on the 仮名 logic.
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葉月 said:
Actually, it's ten-ou, with "ou" being a single sound (which is important, there's no "u" there, it's just lengthening the preceding "o"). Unless you meant to write "spelling" in the above?
I meant the full kana-by-kana spelling of its component kanji, as opposed to the kanji grouping. My kanji dictionary gives オウ as an on'yomi of 王.
flamingspinach said:
(lots of words)
Wow. That was pretty damned educational.
Heh, and here I thought I was being as theoretic as anyone would on this board. Sort of nice to see that is not the case.
Flamingspinach, I have trouble grasping parts of what you wrote since I do not have enough Unicode installed (and even if it is harder to admit, my rusty structuralist view of general phonology may have a flaw or two ;p ). Perhaps I will get back to you by PM at some point.
Concerning heavily etc., English is just a lingua franca for me, and I am prone to having misconceptions like that. I wish most of what I write is roughly understandable to fellow Danbooru members anyway.
Actually, my choice of term was intentional. Maybe I should have put it this way: "I consider English a practical communication tool rather than a foreign language I am really trying to master."
That does not mean I reject helpful feedback, though. Free language lessons are always welcome.
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