[ruby-talk:6023] RE: Ruby T-shirt

At Fri, 3 Nov 2000 06:40:02 +0900,
[e-mail] wrote:

> Thirdly, I have been wondering something. There *must* be a Japanese
> word for "ruby" (the jewel), right? I have wanted to know how to write
> it, kanji or katakana or both. I asked my friend Miho about it -- the
> one who obtained Matz's Japanese book for me (so I could read "the code
> between the kanji").

When we Japanese language meet foreign words, we have three ways for
importing it.

* First way is to write it directly without any translation. This option
  is often applied to words written in latin alphabet.
* Second way is simply to rewrite the word phonetically using
  katakana(our phonetical alphabet:-)
* Third way is to rewrite it using knaji characters regarding its
  original meaning.

Historically or traditionally, Japanese used the third way mainly, but
contemporally Japanese tend to choose the second:-) When we use the
second way, the precise pronunciation of the original word tends to be
remapped to Japanese phonetic system (especially for vowels) and the
resulted Japanese word can be non-understandable for people using the
original word natulally, though.

Anyway, I'll show Japanese representation for the word 'Ruby' in
katakana and kanji here.

URL: http://www.weatherlight.org/~crouton/tmp/rubyj.png

In kanji expression, the first character means red/scarlet or colors
similar to them, and the second means small orb like... eh... pearls:-)

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