5 Jan
2015
5 Jan
'15
5:22 p.m.
From: Noel Chiappa
Sent: Sunday, January 04, 2015 2:04 PM
From: Chuck Guzis
> I suspect that other languages have similar
exercises, though
> I don't know what the Japanese do in Kanji.
Err, think you mean kana, right? (Kanji are the
ideograms, there are over a
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
thousand in common use.) ...
No, they are not. Kanji are *LOGOgrams*, expressing *words*, not *ideas*.
(In fact, in Japanese they can express more than one word, given whether
they are read as Japanese or one of several different Chinese pronunciations,
of which kanon[1] and goon[2] are most common.)
... There is something called the 'iroha':
which is a poem which uses every element of the
Japanese syllabary - and
exactly once! It was used to teach writing, no idea if it's used for the
keyboard thingy.
A fellow graduate student in linguistics, a young lady from Japan, told me
35+ years ago that this poem was no longer used in schools, and that kana
were taught with reference to a grid layout. She also characterized it as
not very good poetry.
Rich
[1] "Han pronunciation", where orthographic <h> represents a velar
fricative
like the German ach-laut
[2] "Wu pronunciation", where the reconstructed Middle Chinese pronunciation
of the character read as "wu" in Mandarin is [gwou] or [gwou?].
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/