Talk:金

Mandarin readings

Can it be added in which contexts the two different Mandarin readings are used? 24.29.238.60 06:42, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

Definition

What does "AIRs in general" mean? 71.66.97.228 00:59, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

That was vandalism from July 2010 that was not noted or reverted until now. Fixed. 71.66.97.228 01:01, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

Ka as nanori

@Eirikr Kanjigen (漢字源) lists ka as nanori ばかFumiko￥^talk 03:45, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

• Very interesting, thank you for the source. Is it truly か all on its own? I've seen renderings like 金(かぬち) (kanuchi), but that's where the か is part of a larger reading that is all assigned to the 金 character. I don't have access to Kanjigen; does it list any examples of this reading? If they don't, I'm hesitant to include it -- vanishingly rare readings have no real use, unless we can attach them to something in the real world and not just the odd corners of academia (much as the various weird readings that can be found in the deeps of the Unihan database). ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 08:31, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

I think Mr. Kanari's name is a very good example on its own. It's a nanori reading so the dictionary doesn't give any example: it only gives examples for on and kun'yomi. Speaking of "the odd corners of academia", it's not easy to know what is what, real and attested, or fabricated by the desire for "perfection" of lexicographers. I believe the main sources you consult, Kokugo Daijiten and Daijirin, sometimes don't tell what really happens in real life either, judging from some very basic flaws I've found in them. I apologize but I'm not really sure how you judge things right now: at one time like that time when you proposed the popularity of ベネチア over ヴェネツィア solely based on what you found in dictionaries without any real statistics or the native speaker's intuition/experiences (and might I add that dictionaries are not the absolute authority when it comes to cases like this: they need constant updating as languages evolve, which is what happens on Wiktionary where we also include words you can't find in any well-established dictionary), and now you're asking for the real use of ka. ばかFumiko￥^talk 13:15, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

• A real-world person, even better someone publicly known, is an excellent example -- thank you. For kanji, I also poke around in certain dead-tree resources that I don't have to hand at the moment, including a name-specific dictionary, and WWWJDIC mirrors usually include ENAMDICT, which supplies a list of nanori readings for kanji. That said, it's incomplete, as nearly any name-related database for Japanese readings is going to be -- Japanese is nothing if not wonderfully flexible when it comes to how kanji are read, most notably in names.

Re: Venice, I do know what I hear when talking with native speakers: and the ヴ and ツィ sounds are exceedingly rare. Sure, JA ヴェネツィア is phonetically closer to IT Venezia, and thus it's wholly unsurprising that the Italian companies and government agencies operating in Japan would prefer that rendering. A quick look at the top hits for google:"ヴェネツィア" -wiki shows that the publishers are Italian, or Japanese living in Italy, or Japanese with significant time spent in Italy. This might be akin to how some English speakers with Francophone experience say /paʁi/ instead of /pæɹɪs/. However, in everyday speech among those not deliberately trying to stick to the pronunciation of the source language for borrowed terms, Japanese terms gravitate towards more standard phonology, resulting in ベネチア being the more common reading among Japanese speakers and on native-JA websites, from what I've been able to confirm.

And re: asking for a real use of ka, I wasn't sure where you got the isolated か reading, and as I wasn't familiar with that, and as not-real-world readings do have a tendency to creep in here, I backed it out and then asked for an example when you re-added it. This is standard: "huh, that's odd, where did that come from?". I'd do that with anyone not a native speaker, and possibly native speakers too. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 19:07, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

It seems that you mistook my point. I was talking about real statistics such as something you get from the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, not just a Google search. And I'm not ignorant about the rarity of the /v/ phoneme in Japanese. I doubt that /v/ even actually exists in Japanese; yes there's a kana dedicated for it (ヴ) but that doesn't mean there's a real /v/ phoneme in Japanese (it's probably just a weak /b/ which hasn't been distinct enough to be recognized as an independent phoneme which is more phonologically accurately represented by バビブベボ, but which is gradually becoming an independent grapheme which is represented by ヴ as people may increasingly prefer a more "proper" way of transcribing loanwords, and therefore potentially becoming a phoneme found in loanwords). I wasn't talking about how popular the /v/ and /tsi/ sounds are in Japanese (which you misinterpreted as "the ヴ and ツィ sounds are exceedingly rare" --those aren't "sounds", they're graphemes, and I think they're pretty popular as graphemes), no, I believe that they're not popular, that they're "exceedingly rare" too; I was talking about how popular the spelling which uses ヴ and ツィ, based on statistics, or on how Japanese people really favor one spelling over another, is. In fact, being a Vietnamese, I'm not unfamiliar with the fact that people just spell the way they could never pronounce: those youngsters who try to sound "cool" always use the spelling "girl" but they always end up saying "girn", or those newspapers and news shows which always use "World Cup" but people just say "worn coop". For all I know, Japanese people probably just say "ベネチア" even though they spell the name as "ヴェネツィア" all the same.

Seems I've been totally off-topic. Okay, looks like ヴェネツィア is not really how most average non-Italian-speaking-or-being-remotely-familiar-with Japanese people spell the name, cool. We should just stop this discussion from here. ばかFumiko￥^talk 04:23, 14 April 2016 (UTC)