Date sent: Tue, 02 Nov 1999 14:24:17 +0000 To: landcruisers@tlca.org From: Dave Stedman Subject: Was: Chassis numbers Now: PS and Japanese Send reply to: landcruisers@tlca.org >PS is German, PferdeStaerke, horsepower....:-)) > >What actually amazes me the most in those Japanese mag's is the use >of Roman characters every now and then, including sub-titles & >numbering *sometimes*....very inconsistent and inconsequent, and >even more odd if you think about the reverse: an mag in Roman >language with Japanese characters thrown in....8-)) Very good WJM an other little tid bit to clutter up my head. There are several very distressing things about the Japanese language (well for me anyway). They use four sets of characters, imported Chinese Kanji for any word that has a character (this does limit your vocabulary to about 10% of the possible range of English), they augment this with hiragana which is used for all purely Japanese words, this will include all of the particles and what not. Then just to really cause problems they also use katakana for all foreign words, katakana has the same sound set as hiragana, if you ask some one here why they use a different set of characters for a different language they will tell you it is so they can tell it apart from the Japanese (extremely strange, kind of like using Greek characters for all french root words in English). So in reading the Japanese magazines that you got from somewhere you will find mostly Kanji with a sprinkling of hiragana to express ideas or opinions, technical words like shock absorber and spring will be written in katakana (not exactly the same pronunciation but close) and stuff that just doesn't seem to fit anywhere goes in romaji (roman characters). I can point you to a web site that will show you the roman equivalent of the katakana if you wish to use a weekend or two translating the technical words. Also of interest in this conversation, the early medical system and engineering was imported from Germany, most of the older doctors are fairly good at German. The engineering has drifted to English over the years but you can still find plenty of lapsed German intonations. Dave Stedman Kakogawa Japan stedman@ans.kobe-u.ac.jp stedman@canada.com http://jamesstedman.tripod.com/Cruisers.html