| Subject: Re: I'm slightly confused - New to Juuni Kokki |
Author:
Niwashi
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Date Posted: 12:55:27 05/28/04 Fri
In reply to:
Mustapha
's message, "Re: I'm slightly confused - New to Juuni Kokki" on 15:15:21 05/19/04 Wed
>(which is more correct? Juuni Kokki? or Juuni Kokuki?
>I've seen it written both ways)
They're both ways of transliterating the Japanese spelling into Roman letters. As to which is more correct, it's more a matter of preference than one being correct and the other wrong.
"Kokuki" is the more direct representation of how the word would be phonetically written in Japanese, coming in turn from the kanji characters "koku" (kingdom) and "ki" (record or chronicle). However, when the "ku" syllable is followed by another syllable in the K-group, its vowel ending (the "u" sound) isn't distinctly pronounced. This has led some romanization schemes to drop the "u" from the end of it in those situations, leaving a double k.
In the Japanese phonetic alphabets, each letter represents a complete syllable and ends with a vowel sound, so there are Japanese letters for "ka", "ke", "ki", "ko", and "ku", but no letter equivalent just to "k". The Roman alphabet, by seperating consonants and vowels into seperate letters, has a lot more flexibility. Some Romanization schemes chose to make use of that flexibility to provide a more accurate representation of pronunciation than is possible in written Japanese, while others chose a more direct transfer of the Japanese written form into Roman letters.
"Kokuki" is more accurate to the Japanese written form, while "Kokki" is more accurate to the pronunciation. Take your pick.
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