On Feb 15, 2:20Â*pm, "Space Cowboy" wrote:
I'm sure BabelCarp has these entries:
kelp 昆布 Chinese
kelp ��� Japanese
Using this group's software for sending Chinese/Japanese characters is
vexatious, and I'm not going to do it.

WIkipedia Japan has an entry for Kobucha (entry's titlehowever, is
written in kanji: Sino-Japanese characters, thus not commiting to any
certain pronunciation). The first line of text tells us, using
phonetic script (in this case, hiragana) that those kanji are read as
both "kobu-cha" and as "koNbu-cha."

Following up on that, I searched Google Japan, and found that the use
of the kanji is, by far, the most frequent way of writing this word in
Japan. (Please note that the use of kanji specifically *avoids*
coming down on *how* to "pronounce" or "read" that kanji.) Number of
hits using the kanji alone: 368,000. Hits using "Kobu-cha" (entered
phonetically with hiragana): 26,600. Hits using "Konbu-cha" (entered
phonetially with hiragana): 794.

For the sake of completeness, I also Googled these two phonetic
versions as written with a *different* phonetic "alphabet:"
katakana. Katakana is best known as the script used for loan-words
from other languages (such as makudonarudo for McDonald's), but it is
also used for other purposes. Katakana can be used for writing names
of things being focused on in scientific discourse, and can also
function like *italics*, to make a word stand out for special
attention. I suspect most of the hits for the katakana versions fall
in these two categories. Anyhow, "konbu-cha" (written in katakana)
got 9,500 hits, and "kobu-cha" (in katakana) got 964 hits.

Thus, when comparing the hits for the specified readings, Kobu-cha in
hiragana gets the most hits (26,600), followed by the *other* reading,
koNbu-cha, when written in katakana (9,500). Third place goes to kobu-
cha in katakana (964), then koNbu-cha in hiragana (794). This needs
to be kept in context: the kanji version, with no specifiable
reading, got 368,000 hits. I suspect that one reason the katakana
version of koNbu-cha was so high because the writers were making a
point of specifying a personal/contextual preference for that reading.

Using Google Japan to try to pin down issues of word frequency/
prefered orthography (cf. "spelling") in Japanese is a complex issue.

james-henry holland
hobart and william smith colleges
geneva, new york