Hi Tony and fellow-students,
Is it that the hiragana/katakana characters are written on the sound you hear pronounced? Or is the way they are written (seeing it back in romanji) the leading factor in choosing the character to use? Maybe I’m not so clear in my question, but the reason I ask this is that I start to recognise the characters in my music, and I know how a certain word is pronounced. But in the hiragana I sometimes see extra sounds coming up. However if you listen carefully, you hear them back in the pronunciation. For example in the word ‘reiho’ (written in romanji) you can hear a very small u at the end, which is not written in the romanji, but in the hiragana you find the characters わいほう(re-i-ho-u).
I wondered if this means that the hiragana is written how it is pronounced and therefore can differ from region (dialect) to region, or even from person to person.
Thanks for the answers to come.
Namaste,
Dun Romin
こんにちわ, アメリカン せんせい,
I guess that 'reiho' is an ancient word for someting like music, song, piece. I never saw some - on the o.
I couldn't get a photo copied here, so I've sent it to you by mail. On there you can see the way our music is written, starting with the name of the piece and ryu and/or composer om the right sight). If you want to insert it here, please do.
Can I please re-ask my first question? Does one write the kana conform the pronounced sound (what you are hearing), or more like the written one?
I mean that would result in the probable difference between ダツ and ドウツ, wouldn't it? Or for example ムリア or マリア, or would it be メリア?
なますて
Dun
こんにちは、ダン（ドゥン？）さん！
I'm not sure what that word is （礼法？）, but a word that is pronounced れいほう in Japanese might be written as 'reiho' in Roman characters just due to laziness on the part of the writer. =) Technically, it should be written 'reihou' or 'reihō', but many people think that 'reihou' looks silly, but it's a pain to figure out how to make the 'ō' character on their PC.
Another possibility is that they are showing an extended vowel sound, not as part of the real pronunciation, but just to fit better with the music. One way to show that might be a ー mark like in katakana, or perhaps with a small う character: れいほぅ (this would be uncommon, though).
If you can give me more context, I might be able to better figure out what is happening in this specific case.
Generally speaking, there is a generally accepted "correct" way to write anything in kana. In the case of your music piece, it can only be れいほう (because the first kanji is read れい and the second is read ほう). Note that the う at the end (in modern Japanese) serves to lengthen the /o/ vowel sound after ほ. This is sometimes romanized as "reihoo" to emphasize that fact. The pronunciation is indistinguishable from something written (incorrectly) as れいほお. As to the romanization on your musical score, whoever created is just ignored the long vowel sound for convenince (resulting in a loss of information as to how the name should be pronounced!)
Sometimes, a doubled お is correct. So the second largest city in Japan is written in kana as おおさか, not おうさか (though both of those "spellings" would be pronounced the same way).
To address the examples you give, ダツ and ドウツ are pronounced very differently ("da-tsu" vs "do-o-tsu"). "Mary" as in Ave Maria is always written as マリア (from the Latin), but the modern name "Mary" is always written メアリー.
As an aside, it says that this piece was originally composed by Ikkyu, one of the more interesting monks in the history of Japanese Zen Buddhism! Cool! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikkyu