On Thursday, March 21, 2002, at 01:14 , Larry Wall wrote:
Jean-Michel Hiver writes:
: > Do Chinese use Katakana? Does such encoding make
: > sense?
:
: Not as far as I know. Hiragana / Katakana is exclusively a Japanese
: thing ain't it?
Yes. Bopomofo is the Chinese equivalent.
Not quite. Bopomofo is more like international phonetic symobols; use
in education but not in real life. And even that seems to have been
replaced with Roman equivalent of Ping Ying.
Well, I only lived in China for less than a year or so and my Chinese
may be as good as your Japanese so I maybe wrong. But I can say I have
never seen one on the street or in a restaurant.
This may be due to the fact that Chinese is almost free of syntactic
sugar. You just lay each Hanzi in correct order and you get the whole
sentense. There is nothing like subject-verb agreement and inflections,
no irregular verb and such. Japanese is completely different
gramatically; Though Japanese has less syntactic sugar than most
Indo-European languages (no subject-verb agreement and just two
irregular verbs), Japanese is full of inflections and prefixes that
would make Damian Conway drool, and that part hiragana is used a lot.
In other words, hiragana works like a glue to bind Kanji blocks.
The other kana, katakana is used today mainly to represent foreign
words as is (but Japanese has much fewer phonemes and more vowel rich so
McDonald's winds up MA-KU-DO-NA-RU-DO, but what the heck). And don't
forget that Alphabet is very commonly used as the (de facto) fourth
script (to the lesser extent, this is true in China; Roman scripts are
accepted as the second script). When we spell perl, it is p-e-r-l in
Japan, too, not PA--RU.
The Japanese love new things (almost postmodanistically!) and scripts
were no exception.I don't know why Hangul was not imported. Maybe it is
just that it has come too late....
Whenever it comes to scripts, you don't always have to be able to
pronounce that. What you get is what you see, it doesn't have to be
what you hear. If you are in doubt, try reading a given perl at loud!
You may die "$!" unless defined($pronunciation);
Dan the Amateur Linguist
