On Sat, Jul 23, 2005 at 08:49:59AM -0400, Ravi Desai wrote: > Isn't that the Chinese word for man? > The word "ren"? > > It could be the Japanese word too, I just recognise it since I'm > learning Mandarin atm.
Chinese and Japanese use the same character for man. The word kanji is often translated into English as Chinese character, though more specifically, it means Han Dynasty character. :) The character (I'd have to restart this email to put it in as I didn't start kinput when I started X) has several pronunciations in Japanese. The onyomi, (Chinese type reading) is jin. In Mandarin, I believe it's often pronounced jen, though that might be Catonese.) Most kanji in Japanese have at least two readings, the onyomi, which will resemble though often slightly differ from, the original Chinese and a kunyomi which is the native Japanese reading. It can get confusing but just as we English speakers can usually distinguish between the pronunciation of I read a book yesterday and I will read a book tomorrow (poor example, but it's early here and my wife's sister is getting ready to go back to Japan, so we're harassed) they can tell the meaning from context. (There are also many homonyms, but that too, like lead the metal and led the past tense of the verb to lead are usually easily determined by sentence.) -- Scott Robbins PGP keyID EB3467D6 ( 1B48 077D 66F6 9DB0 FDC2 A409 FA54 EB34 67D6 ) gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys EB3467D6 Spike: I'm bad! It's just I can't bite anymore, thanks to you wankers... Bye the bye, if you're trying to kill her... (gives Riley two thumbs up)
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