And in a number of the ***su words, the u bit seems to be dropped when pronounced, sometimes not. As an an example,
doomo arigato gozaimasu drops the u in gozaimasu…
Languages select a set of permitted sounds - it helps to have phonetic syllables to drive those sounds, and in the case of the Chinese idiograms and Japanese Kanjii, these are forced, in the Japanese as the Hirigana and Katakana.
They aren’t unique to Chinese, though they originated with them. The same characters are used to write Japanese (along with a couple of other character sets based on Chinese characters, but used to write words phonetically), and they used to be used for Korean and Vietnamese.
Just in case anyone gets confused, the spelling is usually “ideogram”, with “ideo” being as in “idea”. I think Derleth was simply making a joke with the comments about “idiosyncratic” and so forth.
Transliteration of Arabic names into English gives great examples – consider this old column from Cecil’s archives about the various spellings of Moammar Khaddafi’s name.
And just as Chinese speakers can choose between sound-alike characters to lampoon a Western name, alternate spellings can do the same in English: e.g. Khadaffy
Japanese uses the katakana syllabary to write Western names (syllabary: think alphabet, but each “letter” stands for a full syllable instead of a consonant or vowel). Sounds are approximated within the range of Japanese phonemes.
For the Arnold Schwarzenegger example above, I’d romanize アーノルド・シュワルツェネッガー as Aanorudo Shuwarutseneggaa (there’s technically no *tse *in Japanese, but they fudge it with a *tsu *plus a small e).
Here’s a full breakdown of every character:
ア a; ー long vowel mark; ノ no; ル ru; ド do; ・separator; シ shi; ュ small yu, size indicating that it modifies the shi; ワ wa; ル ru; ツ tsu; ェ small e, size indicating that it modifies the tsu; ネ ne; ッ small tsu, indicating that the next consonant is doubled; ガ ga; ー long vowel mark
Further note: a “long” vowel in Japanese is literally that–a vowel that is held longer than a short one. Other than that, it’s the same sound. (Note that this applies to Tokyo, i.e., mainstream, Japanese.)
Isn’t that a bit differnt, because Mark and Marc are pronounced the same regardless of spelling but part of the problem with Gaddafi and spelling is that it uses sounds not normally used in English
It should be something like “Dariru” (English “l” and “r” both become “r” in Japanese, and the final consonant must have a vowel after it unless it is “n”).
Typically, but not always. The ex-pat who runs this site is named Peter Paine. He said when he went to register his name at the local town hall, he went for a combo: pi ta in katakana and the kanji for “bread” – pronounced pain in Japanese (thanks to the Portuguese who introduced the stuff).
1.) That is how *he chose *to write his name, not how a Japanese person would have written it.
2.) *Bread *in Japanese is パン (pan), and it’s nowadays always written with those katakana (*not *kanji). He might have used the kanji originally used to write it, though: 麺麭 or 麪包. But a Japanese person wouldn’t write *bread *that way.
That first translation is… interesting. The thing with Katakana translations of names is that it’s not really standardized, there’s not a committee that tells you your name in Japanese, it is, quite simply, whatever sounds right to you.
That’s debatable, it’s also considered moraic since it’s possible to have multiple kana to a syllable.
Edit: Well, not debatable per se, it is a syllabary but it’s not as cut and dry “a character is a syllable” as the definition you gave would imply at first glance.
1.) It may not be officially standardized, but there are common ways of Japanese-izing western names, especially famous ones, and various sounds. For instance, *ar *is almost certainly going to become aa and not aru.
2.) Yes, a Japanese “syllable” is called a mora, and a syllable may be written with more than one mora. It’s debatable whether that makes the kana completely distinct from other syllabaries such that a separate term is required. I’m not getting into technical linguistics here, just trying to give people a framework for understanding written Japanese.
Some background: Japanese was my foreign language in college, and I spent a semester at Tokyo’s 上智大学 (Jouchi Daigaku/Sophia University), living in Japan for a bit over four months.
ETA: Whoops, looks like you edited as I responded. Hope this cleared things up.
True, but rule zero is generally “if it doesn’t sound right try something else.” (Is it me or is that rule zero for everything?) Just going by letters is almost always a bad idea, I have it on good faith that putting my last name into katakana by spelling only was one of the most grievous atrocities done to gitmo detainees (it becomes a lot easier once you hear me pronounce it). But yeah, generally certain letter combos are going to be put in a certain way because they usually work correctly that way, and if they don’t, edit it!
My original post there before I edited had a rather long explanation with mora and such, then I decided it wasn’t worth it and would probably have caused more problems than it solved so I changed it to what you saw.
Agreed, and definitely agreed. I guess the point I was trying to make was that not every possible transliteration of someone’s name is going to be “right”–it’s not what the *person *thinks it should be written as, it’s what *an average L1 speaker of Japanese *thinks it should be written as. Take the last name “Bartel.” Some nice American with this surname starts studying Japanese and thinks that it should be written as バルテル (Baruteru). Almost certainly, their teacher will correct it to バーテル (Baateru). (That’s the sort of thing that the “*ar *-> *aa *rather than aru” was meant to indicate; I forgot to specify syllable-final. It’s one of those reasonably standardized things that isn’t immediately intuitive to an L2 speaker.)