There is a place in the buried west

[sovay]

Please blame the current lack of content on rushthatspeaks, who lent me the first three volumes of Saiyūki last night. I am at the moment on Volume 7. I will surface presently.

I need an icon of Cho Hakkai.

[edited 2007-03-24 20:13]

I should have borrowed Saiyūki Reload, too. Dammit.

Comments

[sovay]

Incidentally, I don't think I had heretofore appreciated just how much of a visual debt Elfquest owes to manga. The eyes and the cheekbones alone . . .

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I have Wendy Pini's Stormbringer artbook, from her ill-fated college attempt to singlehandedly make an animated film out of Michael Moorcock's Stormbringer (she got a lot farther than most units of one person do; most of the book is storyboarded or better), and it is Very, Very Clear that she had been spending a lot of time with Yoshitaka Amano. (Which is a good thing, really, influence-wise.)

Orthography: I don't know how you're getting o-macron in LJ, but. Basically, o-macron and o-with-a-carat-over-it are old-style ways of expressing the long o sound. Newer orthography is trying to respect the fact that in actual Japanese spelling, a long o is spelled with the letter o followed by the letter u-- this is to distinguish a lengthened o from a doubled o, which is spelled oo in Japanese and pronounced o'o, with a short breath between. O followed by an actual u (o'u, with a breath) is not a common sound pattern in Japanese and tends to be written in English with the apostrophe. Sometimes, before consonants, you will see long o written as 'oh'; this is because the correct pronunciation of, say, the surname spelled in Japanese o-u-tsu-gi is much more intuitive to the English reader as Ohtsugi than as Outsugi.

So youkai is a long o, the spelling 'yokai' is wrong, and the macron is an older system.

As for the disappearing y in the names: there aren't separate letters for sounds like 'sho', 'sha', 'jo' and 'ja' in kana. Instead, one writes the letter shi, or ji, and then in miniscule underneath it adds a ya, yo or yu letter (shi + ya = 'sha', etc.) The y-sound at the beginning of the letter in miniscule vanishes entirely in speech. Current Romanization is of two minds about whether to leave the unspoken y in the written form. Modern practice, in the same respect-Japanese-spelling impulse that leaves the u of the long o, tends to leave it.

Finally, even modern orthographers occasionally yield to the temptation to leave the u off the long o at the ends of words, for fear of the reader pronouncing it 'oo'. Personally, I would prefer consistency, which gives one 'Gojyou' and 'Genjyou'.

Clear as mud?

*uses the only Saiyuki icon I have at the moment*

[sovay]

I don't know how you're getting o-macron in LJ, but.

I picked up the HTML for a handful of random diacritical markings when I was transliterating from Akkadian, and went with this particular system because I found the most attributions for it online.

So youkai is a long o, the spelling 'yokai' is wrong, and the macron is an older system.

Goodbye, macron.

Clear as mud?

Actually makes sense. Thanks.

*uses the only Saiyuki icon I have at the moment*

It's a very good one.