Re: [idn] I-D ACTION:draft-ietf-idn-cjk-00.txt

["Adam M. Costello" <amc@cs.berkeley.edu>]

Disclaimer: I'm not a Japanese speaker, I've merely taken a year of
Japanese.

Frank Ernens <fgernens@enternet.com.au> wrote:

> > Katakana is a mirror of hiragana with few more forms
>
> I seem to remember seeing somewhere katakana forms for VA, VI, VO,
> VE, though, yes, they are not commonly used. They can be represented
> in Unicode using the voiced diacritic 0x3099 after the corresponding
> unvoiced syllable.

Unicode 3.0 has codes for these:

30F7;KATAKANA LETTER VA;Lo;0;L;30EF 3099;;;;N;;;;;
30F8;KATAKANA LETTER VI;Lo;0;L;30F0 3099;;;;N;;;;;
30F9;KATAKANA LETTER VE;Lo;0;L;30F1 3099;;;;N;;;;;
30FA;KATAKANA LETTER VO;Lo;0;L;30F2 3099;;;;N;;;;;

These are voiced versions of WA, WI, WE, WO.  The katakana WO is very
rare, and WI and WE are obsolete.  There is no WU, so katakana VU is a
voiced U, and the sounds va, vi, ve, vo are represented by VU followed
by small A, I, E, O.

> > and they are used to integrate foreign words or phrases into
> > Japanese, or to emphasize words or phrases even in Japanese, or to
> > represent onomatopoeia.
>
> These are similar to the situations in which italics are used in
> English. Unicode doesn't provide a way to do italics - unless you
> count the nonspacing underscore diacritic - but it does distinguish
> the two kinds of kana. Since we are presumably not going to allow
> italics, this is an inconsistency which we or registering authorities
> should probably correct.

Somewhat similar to italics, yes, but not the same.  Italic letters look
very similar to their upright Roman counterparts, but most katakana bear
no resemblance to their hiragana counterparts.  The use of hiragana
versus katakana is part of the spelling of a word, not just its
presentation; for example, the word pasokon (a uniquely Japanese word
derived from English roots, meaning personal computer) is spelled using
katakana, and would just look wrong in hiragana.

[When people wonder why Japanese should have both hiragana and katakana,
I usually respond by asking why the Roman alphabet should have both
upper and lower case.  Curiously, I've noticed that the case of Roman
letters in Japanese song titles (like "a walk in the park", "CAN YOU
CELEBRATE?", "How to be a Girl") is preserved much more faithfully
than in English song titles ("Ray of Light", "Ray Of Light", "RAY OF
LIGHT"--no one cares).  I wonder if it's because Japanese speakers
naturally consider case to be part of the spelling, by analogy with
hiragana/katakana.]

AMC