Thanks!
D'oh!
.
Well, I don't know how my sources square with others, but here goes:
I looked up the word "animation" in Jdic, Jim Breen's excellent
Japanese-English dictionary program. The only definition I got was
"a-ni-me" in katakana. There was no hiragana or kanji equivalent offered.
It's a safe bet that "anime" is a borrowed word from another language.
In the book "All About Katakana" by Anne Matsumoto Stewart [Kodansha],
one of the purposes of katakana is for words borrowed from other languages.
While there is no law saying what must be used, it's a safe bet the katakana
spelline "anime" is the common usage.
Hope that helps.
John> Hi. Just wondering if someone can tell me FOR SURE whether the
John> Japanese spell "anime" using hiragana or katakana.
Katakana; it's not a Japanese word so you whouldn't use hiragana.
--
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katakana. I think it's a loan word from from French for
animation.
--
*-----------------------------------------------------*
| | | George Wu |
| . - - - -. | University of Ill. |
| | | | Computer Eng. |
| / - - - - - | |
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| / | g-...@ux5.cso.uiuc.edu |
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At all the Japanese bookstores I've been to, they label the tapes in
katakana. Long before I knew any Japanese I learned that all of those
tapes were labeled with what looked like ` P=X '...
-- Timon --
>John> Hi. Just wondering if someone can tell me FOR SURE whether the
>John> Japanese spell "anime" using hiragana or katakana.
>
>Katakana; it's not a Japanese word so you whouldn't use hiragana.
Yes. Loan words (except from Chinese) are written in katakana.
However, some loan words can be written in hiragana, or even kanji,
since they've been used for a long time and are considered as if
genuine Japanese words. e.g. tabako, kiseru, kabocha etc.
ITO Takayuki <yu...@is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp>
tentative signature for rec.arts.anime/manga