sábado, 15 de febrero de 2014

Curioso

De aquí:

Every language has its own distinctive system of patterns that make up the phonological system of that language. In some, the syllable type is highly restricted. Japanese syllables, for example, almost always end in a vowel or in /n/; a Japanese syllable may end in a consonant only if it is identical to the beginning consonant of the following syllable (like the first [p] in Nippon). This strict syllable structure is revealed very nicely when an English word is borrowed into Japanese, as with many baseball terms. The English word strike, for example, which has only one syllable, has five syllables in Japanese (/su-tu-ra-i-ku/), because each consonant must have its own syllable, and there can only be one vowel sound in any syllable. Note that the letter "i" in English is actually pronounced /ay/ and so contains a consonant. Similarly, the word baseball has four syllables in Japanese. English allows fairly complex syllables, by the standards of most languages: the word sixths ends in four consecutive consonants (since "x" is actually two: [ks]). But Georgian easily beats that: the word prckvnis 'he peels it' begins with five consonants and gvprckvnis 'he peels us' begins with seven!


Las palabras que los japonesas han tomado prestadas de otros idiomas son curiosísimas, p.ej. shawa (=ducha), hoteru (=hotel), sutairu (=estilo), arubaito (=trabajo), y la mejor de todas: aisukuriimu (=helado).