From: Rick DeNatale <rick.denatale@...>
Date: 2006-08-31T02:35:55+09:00
Subject: Re: How to spy on the Japanese Rubists

> Their language is based more upon sounds than most.

Well, Japanese does have very regular pronounciation, there are
relatively few syllables, around 50, and these tend to be pronounced
much more consistently than in other languages.

> Each character
> represents a sound, and then sounds together create a word.
> Our letters
> do have sounds, but the complete sound is only made with a combination
> of letters.

Sort of,  actually there are three Japanese 'character sets' which are
used for different purposes.

Kanji, are the Chinese pictorial characters, each Kanji stands for a
word or a concept.  One of the neat things about Kanji is that
speakers of languages which use Chinese characters can often read
written material despite the fact that the writer and reader speak
different languages.

There are two character sets (kana) in which each character represents
a sylable.  Hiragana is used for writing Japanese words often in
combination with Kanji.  Japanese children usually learn hiragana
first, since there are far fewer symbols than Kanji. The forms of the
Hiragana characters are derived from Kanji, and look curvier than...
Katakana, which covers the same syllables as  Hiragana, but is used
primarily for writing words borrowed or adapted from other languages.

There's also romanji which is the english/european alphabet, which is
used to directly quote foreign names, and sometimes as a
transliteration of katakana/hiragana.  Foreign words tend to get
modified to match the closest Japanese pronunciation so "Miss America"
 would get rendered as Mi-su A-me-ri-ka in romanji, with the Japanese
'mi' being pronounced something like 'me', the Japanese 'me' like the
english 'may,' and the Japanese 'ri' something between 'ree' and
'lee,' actually a sound close to 'dee.'

>'rubima' (Ruby Magazine) can only be written 1 way in their
> language,

Actually, I'm pretty sure that rubima comes from a popular style of
jargon used by young Japanese, and among varous Japanese enthusiast
groups which comes from abreviating, usually English, words and
phrases.  There are at least two words for magazine(periodical) in
Japanese, ma-ga-jin which would be written in katakana, or zasshi
which would be written in kanji.

> and apparently also means 'motivation bean jam'.  Any time
> they shorten something like that, it's almost assured to also mean
> something else.  The translator has no way of knowing this was a short
> form of other words, and does its best to translate.

Well maybe it's coming from there. I've discussed this with my
Japanese-American wife, and she couldn't figure out how.  The only
thing I can think of as being bean jam would be anko, which is a
popular stiff jelly-like sweet made from the azuki bean.

I suspect that it's really coming from a translation of something
else, perhaps someone's name, sort of like a rote translator of
Italian, translating my last name to "of Christmas."

But then, I could be wrong.

-- 
Rick DeNatale

My blog on Ruby
http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/