Talk:Jōdai Tokushu Kanazukai

clean-up
I sought out the template for "this article relies too heavily on scholarly jargon, which obscures meaning from the average reader" and couldn't find it. Anyway, that is my problem with this article, and in point of fact with a lot of the linguistics-related articles I've come across on Wikipedia. I have a pretty good understanding of the structure of the Japanese language, and the terminology involved (e.g. kana, mora, different kinds of verbs, shinjitai, kyujitai, manyogana), but I'm no linguist. And the vast majority of this article is completely incomprehensible to the average reader who lacks extensive knowledge in one or both of those fields.
 * Kanazukai is a redlink, and not explained in this article, leaving the introduction almost completely useless and meaningless.
 * I can figure out what a dieresis is from the context - it's the two dots above the vowel. But to say they represent "i2, e2, and o2, and assumes that unmarked i, e, and o are i1, e1, and o1." ... what does that mean? Is that something a linguist would understand?

I hope we can fix these problems in this article, and in others, so as to make it easier for someone like myself, with an interest in how languages compare, but no interest in the dense and dry technical jargon of formal scholarly linguistics, to be able to enjoy and learn from Wikipedia articles on the subject. LordAmeth 01:03, 2 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Perhaps the Template:Technical is what you are looking for. I added it to this talk page, as per usage.
 * Kanazukai is no longer a redlink. Been busy, but I would like to discuss the various theories regarding the meaning and interpretation of 1/2 sometime soon. Bendono 04:37, 10 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Thank you Bendono, it would be amazing if you can expand on the theories about 1/2 but the article is already very informative and clear. Please know that your work is very appreciated. 176.200.116.144 (talk) 20:26, 29 February 2024 (UTC)
 * I disagree with you and would like to thank those who wrote the article for their amazing work. 176.200.116.144 (talk) 20:18, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

Rant
SERIOUSLY - I find most of this article to be irrellevant to the Japanese language, as it relates to mostly how LINGUISTS, or should I say, a certain GROUP of linguists see and hear Japanese.

The Japanese, for example, do not use Roman letters; they use their graphemes, or KANA. (Katakana and hiragana.) It's interesting to see an entire linguistic system based on Roman characters to describe a language that DOES NOT USE THEM. The system described in this article, therefore, would only make sense to Linguists who have decided to use Roman characters as their base of study for Japanese, and who have ascribed certain rules to them. (IE, that "h" will be used to describe the entire "ha" row, even the syllable that is closer to "fu.")

I find the use of Roman characters to describe Japanese grammar to be pretentious. The verb 咲く, for example. The jargon used to describe this verb is "/sak-/", when this cannot actually be written in actual Japanese characters, the only conconant final being "n." Again, this explanation ONLY makes sense to those using this invented system using Roman characters and who have learned the special rules governing them in the case of Japanese. (IE, specialized linguists dedicated to learning this system...)

I think that explanations in Japanese characters should be undertaken in a way that MOST people could read and understand them, rather than how specialized linguists see them. Different field for a different article...

222.151.236.116 (talk) 05:34, 5 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Orthography and linguistics are two entirely different topics. This is an article about linguistics. If you'd like, you could start an article about orthography. Bendono (talk) 05:54, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

phonemes of old Japanese
I think /h/ in the list of syllables is improper, because the phoneme which is /h/ today is thought to have been /p/ or /F/ at the period Jodai Tokushu Kanadukai was alive.59.147.73.181 (talk) 15:59, 8 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Note the difference between // and []. The phoneme /h/ was realized as [ɸ]. At some time before that it was certainly *[p]. If you decide to describe it as /F/ or /p/, how are you going to describe [p] or [h] in later periods? Bendono (talk) 05:51, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Confusing or self-contradictory
This article confuses me. The lede (lead?) says it's archaic kana. A later section says it predates kana. Which is it? Please clarify. 2601:441:4400:1740:A58F:9116:857A:AB26 (talk) 14:56, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Middle Chinese Pronunciation
It would be prudent to give some examples of the pronunciation of type A and B manyogana, to give some indication beyond their contrastive distribution (statistics) that they actually were pronounced differently (without going into exactly how). This could either be in its own section, under the 'meaning' section, or as an addition in the table (I'd suggest tooltips, but that goes against policy).

Specifically I think the reconstructed Middle Chinese pronunciations of the characters, as that's what the Japanese writers would have based their usage on, should be shown below them in the table (with a caveat that they are only reconstructions themselves), giving at a glance some basis for understanding why certain transcriptions would use yi and iy, for example. The Japanese version of the article links to the wiktionary pages, but that requires a lot of running around by the reader to get a general sense of the differences.

e.g.

Anyway, thought I'd mention this here instead of just going ahead and messing with the page massively and pissing someone off. IntelVoid (talk) 04:20, 27 October 2022 (UTC)