The CHI tenten

February 28, 2007 on 1:51 pm | In Language | | Email This Post

「縮む」 - 「ちぢむ」 - pronounced “chijimu”.

In modern Japanese, this ち with the “ten ten” is pronounced exactly like 「じ」。

Likewise, the world 「身近」- 「みぢか」pronounced “mijika”. Also uses this annoying rare 「ち」 with the quotes.

The thing that irks me about this, is that when looking words up in the dictionary, or even when inputing them into a PC you won’t find the Kanji you are looking for if you replace the 「ぢ」with a 「じ」。So even if you type in “chi.ji.mu.” you won’t get 「縮む」。

Isn’t that annoying?

Also to input 「ぢ」you type “di”.

意味分からん！

- Harvey

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  1. Gravatar

    Thank you, sir.

    I knew about the ぢ, but I didn’t know about inputting it, nor had I given thought to dictionary lookups. You’ve probably saved me hours of frustration. :)

    Comment by Mac — February 28, 2007 #

  2. Gravatar

    Mac, I’m glad this was useful to you.

    This is why I love the internet! People helping people. Gotta love it.

    Comment by harvey — February 28, 2007 #

  3. Gravatar

    Some of those words still get me to this day. I’ll be sitting here wondering why the kanji I want won’t come up, until I finally remember to ask myself, “Hey, is this one of those ぢ words?” I’ll correct it, get my proper kanji, and then promptly forget the correct form so that I’m stumped again the next time I type it. :)

    Thankfully Microsoft’s IME catches some of these and suggests the appropriate kanji, but I wish it were more complete. For example, みじか does bring up 身近, but ちじむ, sadly, doesn’t link to 縮む. It’s been a while since I’ve typed Japanese on Linux or a Mac, so I can’t remember how helpful they were with words like these.

    Also to input 「ぢ」you type “du”.

    Don’t you mean “di”?

    Comment by Michael — February 28, 2007 #

  4. Gravatar

    Michael, right about the “di”, I fixed the post. Not sure why I typed “du”… ボケてた。

    My Mac doesn’t get 身近 with みじか。 So sad…

    Comment by harvey — February 28, 2007 #

  5. Gravatar

    Have you ever tried Chasen?

    Surprisingly, it offers the correct kanji for both of the examples here even when typing ji rather than di. Microsoft and Apple could take some lessons!

    Comment by Michael — March 1, 2007 #

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