h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Great page. Very interesting.

Anyway, I was wondering, could you tell me how the japanese pronounce a few karate words;
Karate (I've heard it pronounced a variety of ways)
Sensai (Is it sens-ay or sens-ai?)
Oos (I dunno what it means but people seem to say it alot. Perhaps you could translate?)

There will probably be some more coming eventually...

I'd like to think more competent people than I are subscribed here (and still active Researchers), but until one of them shows up to prove it I'll tell you as much as I'm confident with. 'Karate' breaks up as 'ka-ra-te', with the vowels all short ('ra' =/= 'rah') and none of them running together with the consonants; no glottal stops, either. 'Te' isn't pronounced 'tee', but it's hard to explain how it is pronounced; there are some audio files at http://www.geocities.com/takasugishinji/japanese/ , under the subsections for 'Standard hiragana', for the basic component sounds of Japanese words.

By 'sensai' do you mean 'sensei' ('teacher', 'master') by any chance? '-sei' does sound somewhat like 'say'; 'sai' does sound like somewhat like 'sigh'; but they are, basically, se|i and sa|i, and the sound reflects that. They're broken up se|n|se|i and se|n|sa|i, though, so strictly they're not sens- anything.

I'm guessing that by 'oos' you mean 'ossu': 'greeting used between close male friends; Hi!; yes sir!; yo!'

http://rut.org/cgi-bin/j-e/dosearch?sDict=on&H=PS&L=J&T=ossu&WC=none&FG=r&BG=b&S=26

The -u in terminal 'su' is often effectively silent.

I've left out stuff on the accents on syllables (strictly, on 'morae') because frankly I'm not sure about them (especially in 'karate'); even though I know how 'sensei' sounds I don't _think_ of it in pitch terms. Accents aren't important for the meanings of most words, but if you want, and if nobody more competent turns up, I can check a dictionary, though it may not run to 'ossu'. Text is less than ideal for this anyway, of course.

Ossu sounds right. And I'll check out the websites for the other things now.

Thanks muchly.