Re: Is "wa" a punctuation mark?

The Wanderer <wanderer@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

On 09/05/2009 06:52 PM, Sean wrote:

It's much more common to encounter romaji Japanese in the form of
single lexical items, phrases, or single example sentences.

In your experience, perhaps - but not in mine.

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."

This is something which puzzles me.

Why exactly do you get a 'hiccup' from that?

If it's because the "natural" pronunciation of that spelling doesn't
match the way that syllable would actually be pronounced when spoken,
then I would expect that you would get exactly the same hiccup when
reading the kana, because は is normally pronounced "ha" instead of
"wa".

If you would get that hiccup from the kana, then you *should* get that
hiccup from the romaji.

I'd be interested in knowing a cogent explanation for this, too. My
position matches Wanderer's on this.

I'm mostly uninterested in the arguments about [romaji as a means
of] representing kana.

But that's exactly what romaji are for...

Here, though, I disagree.

Human language, as processed by our brain, is (AIUI) primarily concerned
with speech. Comprehension and production of written language is a
comparatively very recent abstraction, and depends largely on our
speech-centric language understanding.

Romaji, like any orthography, serves at least dual purpose: to attempt
to record pronunciation *at the time the system was devised*, fur the
consequent purpose of an attempt to aid the reader in knowing what
speech is represented.

That dual purpose makes a necessary contradiction, since the reader in
most cases is *not* reading in the same context as that the romaji was
designed for. Readers will be reading at later times, when Japanese
pronunciation conventions have changed. Readers will be reading in
different cultures and educational backgrounds, where their expected
pronunciation of Latin letters will differ from that intended by the
designers of the specific romanisation system. And so on.

So I don't think that “representing kana” is “exactly what romaji are
for”. Rather, in most cases, representing Japanese pronunciation is what
romaji are for.

Kana (and kanji) normally do represent speech, in Japanese.

Romaji are, purely and exclusively, a means of making written Japanese
accessible to people who have not learned the kana and/or the kanji.

Yes, in the sense that romaji *is* a kind of “written Japanese”; but
this necessarily means that they are an attempt to stimulate the
speech-based language areas of our brain.

In this role the romaji battle against at least two opposing forces: the
established kana system, which while standardised has flaws (e.g. the
mismatch in pronunciation of particles that started this sub-thread),
and the many variations in established pronunciation of the Latin
letters (which pronunciation is nowhere near as standardised as the
pronunciation of kana).

A given romaji system cannot simultaneously be consistent with the
existing kana and the existing pronunciation of the letters they use.

Romaji are not for representing spoken Japanese, and should not be
treated as if they were.

I don't see this position as either useful or defensible.

Any use of romaji to represent spoken Japanese should be taken through
the (potentially implicit) intermediate stage of representing it as
kana and/or kanji first.

This one I sympathise with; I think it would be more useful *in the
purely-written medium of Usenet* to use romaji consistent with the kana.
Because we already have well-established romaji conventions that do
exactly that, I don't think it's too much to ask.

--
\ “Instead of having ‘answers’ on a math test, they should just |
`\ call them ‘impressions’, and if you got a different |
_o__) ‘impression’, so what, can't we all be brothers?” —Jack Handey |
Ben Finney
.

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