Quote:
Originally Posted by SinsI
...lots of interesting stuff....
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You make some good points. I see advantages in both methods. The discrepancy between speech and sub sometimes bothers me, too. It would probably be good for different subbers to use different methods. But I suspect that the groups with enough interest to sub this may have people of Chinese ancestry in them, to whom the Japanese pronunciations simply sound weird -- as they do to me.
In modern Mandarin -- the official language of China, variants of which are the mother tongue of about 3/4 of the population -- these are the pronunciations. However, what the exact pronunciations were in the time and place this show is set -- 2250 years ago in what is now Shaanxi province -- is difficult to know for sure. And the pronunciations in other modern Chinese languages (e.g., Taiwanese, Cantonese) will be a bit different -- though not as different as the Japanese.
Chinese words entered Japanese at different times and from different parts of China, which is why there is often more than one Chinese-derived pronunciation of a given
kanji. And there are also the pronunciation(s) of the native Japanese word(s) the
kanji is used for. Written Japanese is even more difficult to master than written Chinese, lol. At least in Chinese, characters tend to have fewer pronunciations (most often only one).
In Chinese, only books for very young children use any equivalent of
furigana. Most Japanese
kanji are exactly the same as the Chinese characters. And there is no equivalent of a superscript or an apostrophe.