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

Been going back over some Japanese stuff (all written in Romanji, using a roman alphabet), and it's been puzzling me why words like "desu" have a "U" on the end when it gets pronounced "dess"?

Also seems to happen with "masu/mass", such as ohayo gozaimasu.

Any ideas? Is there a reason for this or was it purely that whichever group of Japanese/westerners first started translating each other's languages decided they shouldn't make it _too_ easy for others to reap the rewards of all their hard work?

Perhaps I should watch that shogun series again. Perhaps there's a clue in there somewhere.

I don't know for a fact but I always assumed that the *u* was a very subtle opening of the throat at the end of the word. Sort of an extremely faint *eu* sound. If you listen to the spoken word you can barely make it out but if you see someone speak it you can see the opening of the throat/mouth, As I said, it's quite delicate.

Another possibility (again, not based on any real expertise) is that these words (Masu etc) end with the same kanji symbol that starts words like "Sumimasen" - since most of the japanese symbols are consonant-vowel pairings, the translaters probably always translate that particular symbol as "su" whether it appears at the start or end of a word, regardles of whether it's vocalised or not.

"-0-"

If it helps, all Japanese syllables end in a vowel, or the letter N. Each syllable is represented by a character in the Hiragana and Katakana scripts. (Never mind the Kanji characters - the Chinese-looking ones - that's another story, as each kanji can represent a group of syllables.)

The transliteration of 'desu' is correct, as it's composed of the character 'de' and the character 'su'. The 'u' sound is very very faint, but there is still a trace of it in spoken Japanese.

(Yes, it's the same 'su' that appears at the start of 'sumimasen'.)

Ivan.

It's got something to do with the fact that Romanji vowels have to be spoken as continental vowels while the consenents are to be spoken in English, although Geordie which sounds quite Japanese (Hai-Aye) tends to forget the vowels altogther for the most part!!!