Hi,
I'm sure there's a qualified Japanese speaker out there who can tell
us this with authority (I'm not that person), but my understanding is
that there is a canonical form for words.
Katakana is used exclusively for foreign words
Kanji (+ Hiragana modifers) is used for Japanese words.
Words are only spelt out in Hiragana in beginners' and learners'
texts, normally in small type above the canonical Kanji form.
This sort of problem exists in English too, but of course to a much
lesser degree. Do you search for "%" or "per cent"? "3rd" or
"third"? "&" or "and"?
Cheers,
Brett
On 22/12/2006, at 4:11 AM, Cyrus Shaoul wrote:
Hi Eric,
It is my understanding that it is possible to write the
pronunciation of all
kanji and kanji compounds in both hiragana and katakana (and each
kanji/kanji compound can
have multiple pronunciations). In most types of written Japanese, it
would be uncommon to write the pronunciation for kanji, and there
are many words that are
always written in katakana or hiragana, and never in kanji, so when
searching for words, having a tool that
would automatically search for a kanji word and it's kana
representations at the same time would not
be that useful.
I should confess that there are some words that are written in both
kanji and kana with higher frequency, such as
some older loanwords, some place names, some proper names, some low-
frequency kanji, and a few other types of words.
I have a gut feeling that the number of words that fall into these
categories is not that large.
I don't know of any tools out there to do the kind of query you
mentioned, but it has been a few years since I
working on Japanese text. In the meantime, I can only suggest
making many queries, one with kanji/kanji compund and others with
the hiragana and katakana spellings of all the possible
pronunciations.
Yours,
Cyrus
http://www.psych.ualberta.ca/~westburylab/
Eric J. M. Smith wrote:
Greetings,
Following up on our recent thread about grep with Unicode, I'm
curious
about how people search for text in Japanese-language corpora.
My understanding of Japanese is rudimentary, but is it not possible
(potentially at least) for the same text to be written in hiragana,
katakana, or kanji? In order to find all occurrences of a particular
string in a corpus, would I have to do the search 3 times, once for
each script? I assume that would be the case for something like
grep.
But are there more sophisticated query tools which abstract away the
question of which script is actually used for data within the corpus?
Thanks,
Eric J. M. Smith
Dept. of Linguistics
University of Toronto
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Brett Powley -- PhD Candidate
Centre for Language Technology, Macquarie University, Australia
w:
http://www.ics.mq.edu.au/~bpowley
faciendi plures libros nullus est finis
frequensque meditatio carnis adflictio est
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