From: John Joyce <dangerwillrobinsondanger@...>
Date: 2007-03-10T17:29:18+09:00
Subject: Re: the name of Matz

On Mar 10, 2007, at 10:20 AM, Martin DeMello wrote:
>
> Interestingly, this is the same 'a' used when transliterating Hindi -
> I've often thought it curious/interesting that "a" got mapped to a
> sound which it never represents in English.
>
> martin

That's simple. English is an amalgamation of many disparate dialects  
with no single phonetic writing system. Writing and much vocabulary  
was borrowed from other European languages resulting in a fuzzy  
mishmash of many different and contradictory patterns of symbols  
representing phonetics. Japanese also is correct in recognizing that  
all consonants other than m and n have a vowel after them, though in  
European languages these are usually unacknowledged and referred to  
as micro-vowels.
the "a" sound in Japanese Romaji is consistently the same in most  
European languages. sounds like the vowel in English words: God, dog,  
car.
Never the less, it is irrelevant, since the way we read  is by  
recognizing the general shapes of words and phrases, not by reading  
each letter individually. This is the same way you read Chinese  
characters (Japanese Kanji).
To connect this to this list: computers are able to read better than  
we are. Fingerprint and face recognition algorithms are similar. But  
the logic of human language is far too implicit, software still can  
not draw on all of the fuzzy cultural references.