Japanese lesson
Monday, May 7 at 3:27 PM
- Japanese has only 5 vowel sounds. When romanized, “i” sounds like a long e, as in “week,” and “u” is a long u as in “clue.”
- Japanese is a syllabically, not phonetically based language. Transliterated consonant blends must be broken into their closest multi-syllable cousins. Final consonants, with the exception of “n,” must be similarly transliterated.
- Japanese has no “th” phoneme, and so it is generally substituted with an “s” sound, usually in the form of the syllable “su.”
- Japanese has only one liquid consonant phoneme, i.e. things that would be either an “r” or an “l” in English lie somewhere in between the two, but is generally romanized with an “r.”
- When writing in Japanese, there are no spaces between the words, no capital or lowercase letters, and almost no punctuation.
Apply these principles to this sign for a pawn shop, the romanized name of which is “buruusurii.”
PS
Will thinks this post is rather Japanesey and linguistic.I finally got it!
A nice linguistics puzzle, for which I am a sucker. I first assumed the final was an -ly adverbial marker, but then assumed (correctly) that the two long vowels designated separate words, and since -ly is less than a full word, I realized (by that analysis) that I was heading in the wrong direction. With renewed alacrity I charged ahead with my new hypothesis--that we were looking for two words, not just one. From there it was easy. But I won't spill the biinasu.
you can say what you will about the japanese language, but they have what i would call a grapheme that looks like a fat man playing a saxaphone
My students enjoyed this tonight - great illustration of differences among languages and how native speakers think about language.