In June, 2000, members of winfield-l@egroups.com started exchanging Winfield-related haiku. In an effort to help the group use the right terminology, I'm offering the following glossary of Haiku terms and an explanation of what constitutes a syllable in Japanese. My own knowledge of Japanese is quite limited and getting more stale each year. I know that some others on the list know Japanese (esp. since one is currently in Tokyo) and corrections are always welcome.
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At the left you see a chart of all of the sounds available to a speaker of Japanese. Each of these sounds is a syllable. Yes, n can be a syllable by itself! It can also be a part of another syllable (na, ni, nu, ne, no). That's why haijin (pronounced like the English word “hygeine”) is 4 syllables long. Even though we think of hai (sounds like “hi”:) as one syllable, it is actually 2 syllables, ha and i. Then jin (sounds like “jean”:) is 2 syllables, ji and n.
If you want to affect a Japanese accent, take the English word and make it fit into what's available on the chart. The word WINFIELD is an excellent example of a word that doesn't make the shift easily at all. Let's try:
As questions arise and I find the time, I'll elaborate further. |
There are 2 fonts for writing phonetically: hiragana (looks cursive) for Japanese words, and katakana (looks more like block lettering) for borrowed words (mostly English). If you learn Katakana, you can easily spot and decipher all borrowed words in Japanese text simply by understanding the limitations of using only these sounds. Learning katakana is even easier when you realize that you need to learn only the letters in the white boxes. The pink boxes are the same letter as the white box above, written with a little ditto mark at the upper right of the character. The green boxes are the same letter as the white box 2 rows above, but with a little o in the upper right corner of the character.