Re: Is "wa" a punctuation mark?

The Wanderer wrote:
On 09/05/2009 04:58 PM, Bart Mathias wrote:

[...]. The only
case that comes to my mind for ambiguity in Hepburn right now is
spelling "long 'e'" as "ei" rather than with a macroned "e." This
could for example lead to people not knowing these words to
mispronounce "tameiki" and "ei." But your preferred system would do
the same, I believe.

I'm not familiar offhand with the "long 'e'" you refer to. What would it
be in kana?

The two main ways of doing it in kana are with an え列のひらがな followed by an い and with an エれつのかたかな followed by an イ.

It's curious that romanization schemes took what was written as (and used to be, long ago) mid-back vowel followed by high-back vowel but pronounced as a long mid-back vowel and wrote it as a mid-back vowel with a macron, but what was written perfectly analogously as a mid-front vowel followed by a high-front vowel--pronounced like a long mid-front vowel--as the "as-in-Italian" representation of the out-of-context pronunciation of those kana.

In fact, I think just as many English-speaking learners of Japanese pronounce the おうof 王様 like English "owe" as pronounce the せい of 先 生 like "say," so I can't guess what led to the difference in treatment.

[...]

you would have favored matching romanization to the kana spelling of
the time, so that romanized Japanese-English dictionaries would have
had entries like

hikiwiru: to lead
kahu/kafu: buy
wiru: to stay, be there
woharu: come to an end
wohu/wofu: chase
wonna: woman
wotoko: man
etc.

If that's the way it was written in Japanese (on which point I have no
knowledge), then yes, that's the way it should have been romanized. If
the Japanese spelling changes, then so should the romanization.

Neat! Then a few years earlier we could have romanized any way we want, because the Japanese as a whole (there were "schools") had no set way of spelling, sometimes going the way something sounded, and sometimes matching what could have been (but often wasn't) the classical spelling of the word. Sometime after the Meizi Isin, the classical (10th century, more or less) spelling became official.

[...]

Of course, if you use capital letters in romanization for purposes like
that, you are then left with the question of how to romanize katakana so
that they're distinct from the corresponding hiragana... (And yes, this
can sometimes be important.)

True, it's hard to do in an ASCII news group, but anywhere else the obvious thing is italics for katakana.

Bart
.

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