Kononaka vs. Koronaka / このなか vs. コロナ禍

A new jargon on Japanese TV news is “korona ka-de” which means something like “amidst the Corona peril”. But this sounds much like “kono naka-de“ (=“under these circumstances) that it confuses me every time.

Background:
The Japanese historically developed two ways of reading Kanji, characters they imported from China.
1. The phonetic imitation of the original Chinese pronunciation [called on’yomi]
2. The adoption of Japanese reading [called kun’yomi]
As an example, in the above, 禍 or peril is pronounced “ka” in on’yomi but “wazawai” in kun’yomi.  When spoken, on’yomi tends to be harder to comprehend.

Problem:  
In Chinese, the meaning of a word depends on the tone height. But the tones were lost during their adoption into Japanese. This is what made Japanese such a homophonous language, creating challenges for interpreters.

Solution:
All good interpreters know how to solve this problem by adding #kun ’yomi after #on ’yomi. E.g. when interpreting the word “chemistry”, I add the word “bake-gaku” [kun’yomi] after “kagaku” to distinguish it from “science” which is pronounced identically.
Translation (Sino-Japanese -> Japanese) within the same language may be required at times. Well, there still seems to be room left for humans to best AI.

#AI #on 'yomi #kun 'yomi #homonym  #japanese