From: Suraj Kurapati <snk@...>
Date: 2007-03-10T12:08:22+09:00
Subject: Re: the name of Matz

Rick Denatale wrote:
> One thing that Japanese has over English is VERY regular
> pronunciation, there are a smallish number of syllables, and a 1-1
> correspondence between each character from either hiragana or katakana
> with the syllable it represents.

Such is also the case with the syllabic languages of India and 
linguistically related parts of South East Asia. There is an exact one 
to one mapping between syllables and sounds -- it sounds how it appears 
and it's written how it sounds. Thus, there is no "hooked on phonics" 
training from a young age. Furthermore, we do not have spelling bees in 
our native languages because everyone would win! :)

IMHO, the primary benefit of such languages is not having to remember 
how particular words are pronounced. Thus you have all this extra human 
memory space (which would otherwise contain mappings from particular 
words to sounds) that you can instead fill with vocabulary or poetry or 
whatever.

Finally, it is said that the order of vowels in the Japanese alphabet 
system is derived from that of Sanskrit. For instance, listed below are 
the vowels from the South Indian Telugu language (the same vowels are 
found in nearly all other Indian languages in exactly the same order). 
The starred (*) vowels are found in Japanese (a i u e o).

start
-------------------
a  (c[u]t)        *
aa (say [aa]h)
i  ([i]t)         *
ii (f[ee]t)
u  (fl[u])        *
uu (f[oo]d)
e  (s[ay])        *
ee (th[ey]!!)
ai (l[ie])
o  (g[o])         *
oo (cr[ow])
au (c[ow])
=================== # below are not really vowels, in the English sense
am (r[um])
ah (b[]uff)
-------------------
end

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