Originally posted by brady
Sory forgot the J on the N1K1, comment above, but you must also remeber I have a get of jail free card hear, I cant spell Jaopanese words either:)
Trying to go backwards from transliterated English to Japanese is ugly, because Japanese shares with Chinese the problem of having several ideographs sharing each phoneme (and, in Japanese, often several ways you can pronounce ideographs, so that in print, you will often see little katakana characters over kanji words so that the reader will know which way the word is pronounced); the 'shi' in 'shiden' is not the same as the 'shi' in 'shinden'; the former is 'shi-den', and the latter is 'shin-den' -- and even 'shi' can have several meaning: 'violet' in 'shiden', and 'dark' or 'hidden' in 'shinobu'. Little spelling typos in a transliterated word can make for
huge shifts in meaning, if they don't turn the word into complete gibberish.
