[Haskell-cafe] Re: anybody can tell me the pronuncation of?"haskell"?

[Dan Weston]

The opposite can also happen.

"Tobacco" (mid-16th century Spanish) is rendered as "tabako" in 
Japanese, in fact a very Japanese-sounding word (perhaps from, ta + 
hako). This may explain why, unlike almost all foreign words in Japanese 
that are written in katakana (a sort of simpler-looking consonant+vowel 
symbol), it is most often written in hiragana like native words and 
grammatical constructions. More likely is the fact that it is a several 
centuries old loanword (brought maybe from Macao?) when katakana was 
more exclusively used by men (it looks visually more masculine, and used 
for grammar by men until WWII) whereas hiragana was used by women, so 
the use of hiragana was not indicative of origin. In fact, it can even 
be written with kanji (especially on signs), which as was mentioned in 
the second reference is no guarantee of Chinese or Japanese origin.

Anyway, according to a very informal survey of friends while I was in 
Japan in the early 80's, most had no idea that "tabako" was a foreign 
loanword.

There is an important adage in linguistics:
  always believe what a native speaker says *in*    his language,
  never  believe what a native speaker says *about* his language.

Dan

Chung-chieh Shan wrote:
> jerzy.karczmarczuk at info.unicaen.fr wrote in article <courier.479F5ED0.00000D92 at averell> in gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe:
>> Arigato gozaimasu. 
>>
>> Jerzy Karczmarczuk. 
>>
>> PS. If you think that "arigato" is a genuine Japanese word, well, check
>> how the appropriately translated word is spelled in Portuguese... 
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean by "genuine", but I suspect that whether
> "arigato" is genuine does not depend on Portuguese.
> http://linguistlist.org/issues/12/12-1871.html
> http://linguistlist.org/issues/12/12-1906.html
>