Template talk:Katakana

Hey !?, do you think it's worth the time to break one of these out for Hiragana? -Derik 03:12, 16 August 2009 (EDT)

Nah. Hiragana doesn't really show up isolated. It's almost always with kanji, which the template isn't effective on. And even if we got a purely hiragana phrase, it wouldn't come out in a form understandable to those who don't speak Japanese. —Interrobang 03:21, 16 August 2009 (EDT)

If MediaWiki's string functions included get-unicode#, I'm bet you could rig a template to translate the 1000+ standard Jōyō kanji without too much memory overhead by breaking the reference tables up into sub-templates. (Like we have for the episode list template.)

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) it doesn't. -Derik 03:34, 16 August 2009 (EDT)

That's a ridiculous undertaking for several reasons. Kanji have different meanings, such as 宙 (chū) meaning "mid-air", "air", "space", "sky", "memorization", or "time interval". And that's not getting into the combination of kanji, forming words. It's like trying to translate "raygun" and getting "beam of radiant energy portable firearm".

If you meant transliteration, then it's still a nightmare. Combinations of kanji do not always use the same syllables mora. See 戦, which can vary between sen, ikusa, tataka, tatakau, ononoku, onono, soyogu, wanana, or wananaku. It could be doable, because there are rules behind which pronunciation is used, but it'd take far too much time to do it for every character. I don't think anybody would appreciate server space being used for this, anyway. —Interrobang 04:15, 16 August 2009 (EDT)

As I said... perhaps fortunately.  ;) -Derik 04:24, 16 August 2009 (EDT)