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Scott DiBerardino (scottd@javanet.com)
Mon, 27 Nov 2000 14:30:38 -0500
> Hey, can someone help me with this question:
>
> "The question is how one gets the name Jagd from katakana, where
> every consonant related character, besides 'n', consists of a
> consonant and a vowel.... ja-gu-do?"
>
> Thought this would apply from the Jagd Doga.
Neil,
Though I don't have it in front of me, my memory tells me that it is in fact
represented in kana as ya-ku-to. This seems to be a pretty fair
approximation of a German pronunication, but I wouldn't know. My
understanding is that "jagd" comes from the German "jaeger", meaning
"hunter".
The issue of how loanwords get represented in kana is an interesting one, I
hope to make it the topic of my term paper in phonology this semester. In
short, in the syllables "ku" and "to" (and certain other syllables like
"shi" and "mu") the final vowels are reduced to the point of barely being
pronounced at all in the Tokyo dialect of Japanese. These syllables then
become natural choices when non-nasal consonants are needed by the Japanese
to render consonant clusters and codas (syllable final consonants) into
their native language.
Hope this was of some help.
-- -scott \\ sdiberar@student.umass.edu- Gundam Mailing List Archives are available at http://gundam.aeug.org/
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