Donmai

Pointless Wikis

Posted under General

jxh2154 said:
Alright, two of the best known translators differ, and obviously I don't know. What am I supposed to do here?

Oh, sorry about confusing you. Soljashy is perfectly right. I was just saying that this word being pronounced as ninin is a manifestation of the EVIL permeating the Japanese society.

葉月 said: Oh, sorry about confusing you. Soljashy is perfectly right. I was just saying that this word being pronounced as ninin is a manifestation of the EVIL permeating the Japanese society.

Oh, alright, fair enough. Evil in what sense? Is there no particularly clear logic behind why the reading is different, or something like that?

jxh2154 said:
Oh, alright, fair enough. Evil in what sense? Is there no particularly clear logic behind why the reading is different, or something like that?

Compounds with 人 from three on up are pronounced with the Chinese number reading and "nin", e.g. 三人 "sannin" and 五人 "gonin", but 一人 "hitori" and 二人 "futari" use the native Japanese number pronunciations and "ri", for reasons lost to the sands of time. "Ichinin" and "ninin" are overgeneralizations, similar to if we switched English ordinal numbers from "first, second, third, fourth" to "oneth, twoth, threeth, fourth".

(Of course, whether or not you think such changes are bad depends on how much of a stodgy prescriptivist you are. :)

The "ninin" reading is mostly used in compounds, and the changing of "ha" to "ba" also indicates that it's a compound pronunciation. Based on that, I think it might be best rendered as "nininbaori", without spaces.

sgcdonmai said:
The "ninin" reading is mostly used in compounds, and the changing of "ha" to "ba" also indicates that it's a compound pronunciation. Based on that, I think it might be best rendered as "nininbaori", without spaces.

I have to agree. The kind soul that corrected my pronunciation of it also changed the tag; that's where the space came from. But the consonant mutation definitely implies a compound.

Soljashy said:
I have to agree. The kind soul that corrected my pronunciation of it also changed the tag; that's where the space came from. But the consonant mutation definitely implies a compound.

Aliased to nininbaori then. I'll move the wiki over.

0xCCBA696 said:
But yeah, even in things that aren't strictly compounds, you can find 二人 being often read as ににん, such as in 二人目.

All of my dictionaries give the reading of 二人目 as ふたりめ, though. :\

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