Re: tlug: Re: Japanese input

[Taro Yamamoto <tyamamot@example.com>]

Kei Furuuchi wrote:
> 2) I rather find the alternative way in term of internet is
> possible. For people who are (un)lucky enough not to have a privilege
> of entering the educational institution of Japan, there have to be a
> way of expressing their idea in Japanese without using kanji or
> hiragana by just understanding Japanese grammar and knowing English words.

	It's an interesting solution. I understand its purpose.

> 5) To be effective on internet or computers, people have to be able to
> read and manipulate scripts of programming languages, which are based
> on English, so is it nice to have a language to describe Japanese. It is
> nice to read *.dvi file, but it is useful to be able to read *.tex
> file.

	Translating Japanese words into another natural language such as
English looks to be something peculiar. If a message writer speaks
French & Japanese, he would prefer using French (as far as I understand
the purpose of this new notation you propose). But the grammer of the
notation is based on Japanese,so message recievers need to know both
French & Japanese. Also, it is thought that Russians prefer Russian,
Germans prefer German, Catalans prefer Catalan, etc. . . . The message
receiver needs to understand various different natural languages in
addition to Japanese.
	If we limit the language for the new notation to just English and
Japanese, it should work, but it can not express Japanese sounds
(pronunciations), while it is partly succeed in expressing meanings.
Also, unlike programming languages (and their target machine languages),
the mapping between English and Japanese words is not necessarily a
one-to-one mapping (btw, I think programming languages are just using
English words and they do not want to be a natural languages. Grammers
of computer languages are artificially very limited and usually more or
less deterministic. If Russians had dominated the computer industry,
Russian words and characters would have been used in computer
languages).
	Thinking this way, I am skeptical about the effect of the separation of
meaning and sound in the proposed notation. I think the traditional
romaji notation works better, if we add some explanatory notes in
English to distinguish conflict words. Also I think it is possible to
improve the romaji notation by using punctuation marks and hyphens
appropriately.

	For example:
	"FORTRAN wa tsune ni kagaku-teki (scientific), suuchi-teki (numerical),
kogaku-teki (engineering) programming ni oite shuyou na (principal)
gengo de atta . . ." (Michael Metcalf and John Reid, FORTRAN 90/95
explained, p. v., Oxford University Press, Oxford 1996)

	Refining romaji looks to work better than inventing a new notation.
	IPA can be used instead of romaji. But both romaji and IPA that express
sounds only do not suffice for writing Japanese texts because of the
abundance of conflict words. Hints to resolve ambiguities need to be
added. (This exemplifies the validity and efficiency of kanji in
Japanese). Also, IPA is like a machine language with many instructions.
Every sound can be expressed in IPA, but poeple will prefer a simpler
notation that suffices for describing Japanese sounds only, as
programmers like to use high-level programming languages that are
suitable for their own purposes. Some languages may require IPA, but we
can use romaji instead.

> 6) Once in internet, there is no control over how to use English. And
> there is Japanese usage of naive and the rest of the world usage of
> it. I wonder which is going to win once used in internet.

	Yes, we are writing English sentences in Japanized (and often
incorrect) ways. It is one remarkable result of the ASCII-centric
communication on computers and networks. Those who have been deprived of
their writing method by an influential foreign culture have to use the
language of the foreign culture, then start transforming the language
and penetrating into the ruling culture. It's an ironical situation.
	Anyway, there are various options (using kanji+kana, romaji, IPA,
English, new artificial notations,etc). We do not need to eliminate any
of these. We do not need to decide which is the best, because it depends
on their real uses, practices and purposes.

--Taro
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