Re: Is "wa" a punctuation mark?

The Wanderer wrote:
On 09/05/2009 12:45 PM, Sean wrote:

The Wanderer wrote:

On 09/05/2009 11:38 AM, Sean wrote:

"Working it out from context" is what language is all about. How
the hell are people going to know that your "ha" is pronounced
"wa" without working it out from context? It's even worse!

The pronunciation is not relevant to the meaning, which is what's
important when reading and writing. If you want to read it aloud,
then yes, you need to work out the pronunciation from the context -
but at least you know, unambiguously, what kana you're trying to
pronounce, and what it means. Working out the pronunciation from
the meaning and the context is less difficult than working out the
meaning from the pronunciation and the context.

Whaaaaaa? Are you saying that the learner should be reading romanized
Japanese without any internal pronunciation? Are you reading this sentence without any internal pronunciation at some level?

No, not really.

When you are speaking Japanese, are you "pronouncing kana"? Of course
not. You seem to be speaking from the linguistically naive position
that a language is its written form, or that the written form is
somehow the basis.

I don't think I am, no. I think I'm simply focusing on the written
language because that's what is relevant to romaji vs. kana.

That would make you a very strange human. In normal humans, the speech motor areas of the brain are active while they are reading (as they are when listening to speech). Consider that written language hasn't been around long enough for us to have evolved special brain functions or brain parts for reading. The process has to make use of existing functions, and that happens to be speech. No big surprise since, for the most part, writing represents speech.


When someone is reading, it doesn't matter whether they internally
pronounce the は as "ha" or as "wa", so long as they know what it means.

What a horrible thought. Well, if it is just a meaningful graphic symbol with no necessary connection to speech, then why not just represent it with a picture of an avocado?

If it is written as "wa", it will be harder for them to tell what it
means - or, if it is not harder, then they will essentially be learning
to treat "wa" as the topic-marker particle, which is not correct. On the
other hand, if it's written as "ha", they can correctly recognize it as
the topic-marker particle and understand the meaning - and until the
point where they read it aloud is reached, it makes no difference what
their internal pronunciation is.

Sorry, but this is just nonsense to me. When I *hear* someone say "Boku wa nihonjin da" I know what they mean. When I *read* it, the same thing applies. You claim somewhere that most readers in this ng are beyond the beginner level. Do you seriously think they are going to have trouble with "wa" in the context of a sentence?


There's probably more, but without refamiliarizing myself with
the formal definition of Hepburn, I couldn't be sure that I
wasn't just railing against the things I dislike in most
romanization schemes instead of things I dislike in Hepburn
specifically. (Though I do seem to remember that Hepburn is the
single worst offender I've yet found and has almost all of the
problems... and yes, as it happens "things I dislike" does
pretty much equate to "things which are ambiguous" in terms of
romanization schemes; the only other thing I've found to
dislike about them is apparently-voluntary mismatches between
how it's written and how it's pronounced, and that's much less
of an issue.)

You don't want to "work things out from context," yet you are
proposing a scheme that is at least as if not more ambiguous than
Hepburn. Watashi ha .... How do I know that the "ha" is
pronounced "wa"? Please, explain to me how I know that? Explain
how there isn't "ambiguity" there?

For an alternate response, more along the lines of the part you didn't
reply to below:

Exactly the same way you would know that は was pronounced "wa" in the
same context.

Please explain to me why you need to know that when reading.

Most of the arguments back and forth here have been concerned with
learners. Learners are learning a language. A language is a thing
that is spoken. The writing system represents that.

True.

Also, please explain to me why it is more important to be able to
figure out the pronunciation than it is to be able to figure out
the meaning.

Gee, when people speak to me I always understand the meaning because
of the sounds they are uttering.

But we're not talking about when people are speaking - we're talking
about when people are reading and writing.

Neurologically very closely related activities.

From http://www.sedl.org/reading/topics/brainreading.html

"Right now, as you read this passage of text, your occipital cortex is very active, processing all of the visual information you are encountering - the words, the letters, and the features of the letters. The frontal lobe of your neocortex is engaged in processing the meaning of the text you're reading - the meanings of the words, the sentences, and the big picture, and it is working to relate what you are reading with what you already know. Surprisingly, your temporal lobe (particularly on the left side of your brain if you're right handed) is also active right now, processing all of the "sounds" associated with reading - even though you're reading silently to yourself, the areas of the brain that process speech sounds are active just like they would be if you were listening to somebody speak. Your brain is very structured in the way it processes information. Complex tasks such as reading a passage of text are broken down into easier tasks, and the easier tasks are distributed to the areas of the brain that specialize in those tasks."


This also doesn't answer the question.

You seem to be completely separating the spoken and the written, and
treating written language as some utterly abstracted system of visual
symbols without connection to the spoken language.

Nonsense. Of course there's a connection. It just doesn't have the
effect you seem to think it does.

Of course you know that writing is a relatively new thing to us
humans, and is just an "add on" when it comes to language. Now,
someone whose Japanese is at a level where they would be flummoxed by
the "wa" in "Tanaka wa Nihonjin desu" is going to be at least equally
flummoxed by "Tanaka ha Nihonzin desu."

Not necessarily. There's a range of skill there, albeit not necessarily
a very broad one.

It's easier to parse the misleadingly-written "wa" in that case than it
is in some others, because of the spaces around it. Those aren't always
present. When parsing romaji without spaces - something I've needed to
do on multiple occasions, because the romaji was taken down as an exact
"don't attempt to parse this, just transcribe it" copy of the original
Japanese, and/or was machine-converted from a kana/kanji original - the
additional information provided by the "ha" instead of the "wa" is
somewhere in the range from useful to essential.

I have never had the need to read long passages of romaji Japanese. If presented with the opportunity, I'd probably turn it down. It's much more common to encounter romaji Japanese in the form of single lexical items, phrases, or single example sentences. In those contexts, I get much more of a reading hiccup from topic marker は written as "ha" than I ever would from seeing it written as "wa."



It's entirely possible that there is ambiguity in the pronunciation
- but if so, there is the exact same ambiguity in the kana as there
is in the one-to-one romaji. You would have to figure out from
context that は is pronounced "wa"; why should you not have to
figure out from context that "ha" is pronounced "wa"?

I never said that the one-to-one romanization scheme was completely
unambiguous in all aspects. I said (or would have said) that it unambiguously represents the kana. If there's ambiguity in the kana
- which there is - then there will be the exact same ambiguity in
the corresponding romaji, and that's precisely the way it should
be.

These last two paragraphs (the latter more than the former) were the
main point of my response, and indeed I think they sum up the main point
of my entire argument; is there any particular reason you didn't reply
to them?

None in particular that I can think of. I'm mostly uninterested in the arguments about representing kana. I'm more interested in using romaji or kana or pictures of avocados to represent *speech*. I'm very interested in the idea of a human who reads without any phonological representation in the brain. Maybe you're a mutation that will result in a new stage of evolution.

(Also, is there any particular reason you haven't been snipping out
these sections that you haven't been replying to?)

You are quite a demanding fellow, aren't you? Any particular reason for that?


.

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