Oh. I honestly thought it was taberu. Now, I’ll just bow out before I propogate any more ignorance.
It is taberu. I know the vowel u in Japanese tends to be swallowed anytime it comes after s, and in a few other places, but I don’t remember if this is necessarily true in all dialects of Japanese. In taberu, as it happens, it is not swallowed.
The rule can’t be “between aspirated consonants” because it also happens in words ending with su even if they are at the end of an utterance. I didn’t even know s could be aspirated. Better summon a Doper fluent in Japanese if we wanna continue this hijack.
Anyway, I came back to the thread because a friend passed me a relevant link. It’s a FAQ about common myths concerning native languages of the Americas. Question four deals with Algonquin’s relationship with Semitic or Germanic languages. The OP’s article about Algonquin/Irish sounds like a new twist on this false claim.
-fh
I think the spelling issue was whether the romanized version of the hiragana symbol prnounced ‘teh’ was spelled ‘te’ or ‘ta,’ not whether you can hear the ‘oo’ at the end of the word.
I’m sorry, I thought the word in dispute was the Japanese verb meaning “to eat.”
The Japanese word for table according to my Japanese-English dictionary is teeburu. The doubling of the vowel doesn’t change its sound, only it’s duration. Japanese does have minimal pairs for short vs. long vowels, so it does matter.
-fh
I can’t tell whether you’re being sarcastic, so I gotta chime in here with a big “nuh-uh!”
From wordorigins.org :
It’s an inside joke. The Cherokee word for coward is “usgianu”. (The “g” is kind of between a “g” and a “k”.)