From: verdy_p (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Fri Dec 18 2009 - 09:03:20 CST
"William_J_G Overington"
> Interestingly, the word Unicode goes through in Latin characters.
> I wondered whether that is because there is no character for Unicode or whether there is one and it is just not in
the database being used for the translation.
> I have since learned that the word Unicode could be expressed phonetically using Katakana characters.
> Yet I am wondering whether there is a complete character for the word Unicode and, if there is not, could one be
devised?
Sorry for this second post, I need to modify some elements:
Google translates "Unique Code" as "ユニークなコード" ("yunīku na kōdo") using kanas. So I guess that the Japanese
translation would be translitterated as "yunīkōdo" by removing some kanas in the middle (but I don't know Japanese
to
see if this can be a good translation).
But if you look at the "What is Unicode?" page on the Unicode.org web site, you'll see that it is translated as:
"ユニコードとは何か？"
You can immediately infer the kanas to remove in the first tested phrase (keep the two first and the 3 last ones) to
produce "ユニコード" ("yunikōdo")...
After thought, "ユニコード" translitterates in fact as "yunikōdo" using a short i : the kana used to note the vowel
lengthener (ー) has been removed in the "What is Unicode?" page, but it has been kept after the "コ" kana noting "ko"
so that it translitterates as "kō" (this may be necessary to avoid a possible confusion with another Japanese term,
or may be the effect of the actual pronunciation of the "i" which is reduced before "k", or two avoid two sucessive
long vowels, or because of the position of stress only on the penultimate syllable of the composite word). I'm not
an expert in Japanese to know why this occurs.
So is it really "ユニコード" with a single long vowel (as in the "What is Unicode?" page) or "ユニーコード" with two long
vowels ?
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