Bill Baxter escribió:
On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 4:11 PM, Nick Sabalausky <a...@a.a> wrote:
"Nick Sabalausky" <a...@a.a> wrote in message
news:gpc4m6$30n...@digitalmars.com...
"Walter Bright" <newshou...@digitalmars.com> wrote in message
news:gpc2ik$2t8...@digitalmars.com...
Nick Sabalausky wrote:
That's one thing that's kind of nice about Japanese. Native words and
loanwords are written in different alphabets (sort of like uppercase vs
lowercase), so unlike English, you generally know if a word is a
properly-pronounced native word or a potentially-differently-pronounced
loanword. (Not that this is necessarily the original reason for the
separate native/foreign alphabets, but it's at least a nice benefit.)
I don't see having 3 alphabets as having some sort of compelling
advantage that remotely compares with the cost of learning 3 alphabets
and 3 spellings for everything.
Native Japanese words never use the Katakana alphabet, and loanwords never
use the Hiragana alphabet (those are the two phonetic alphabets). So in
Japanese, each word has at most 2 written forms: one using the
non-phonetic Chinese Kanji characters (ie, the third alphabet) and one
using just whichever -kana is appropriate. Also, suffixes and articles
(ie, not the "magazine" type) are always (to my knowledge) in Hiragana,
never one of the other two alphabets.
Also, the "two" phonetic Japanese alphabets are really comparable to
either uppercase vs lowercase or cursive vs print. So in the same sense
that Japanese has three alphabets, we really have four.
Also, I'm not saying that their way is either better or worse overall. I'm
just saying that it does at least have certain benefits.
I can tell you that my son is having a much easier time learning to
read hiragana than roman letters. He knows his ABCs but he still
can't really read much of anything using what he knows. The hiragana
on the other hand, once you know 'ka' for instance it's pronounced
precisely 'ka' wherever you see it. So he calls them out on all the
signs he sees. The only mistake he makes is sometimes reading right
to left instead of left to right. But he gets frustrated trying to
pronounce English words.
Spanish, French and Italian are also easy in that sense. There's not
much choice as to how to pronounce a word. Either a letter is pronounced
always the same, or a combination of letters is pronounced always the
same. The only gotcha is that many letters may have the same sound, so
by hearing the word you might not know how to write it.
In the company I work we just finished building a website, chose a name
for it, and we still don't know how it is pronounced in English. We only
have suppositions. :-P
