> "TÅkyÅ" is not an English transliteration of Japanese, as it uses diacritics not 
 > found 
 > in English.  The correct English transliteration is in fact "Tokyo", which does not 
 > round trip.

My mistake, I meant Latin/Roman transliteration. 

> > or Kahnawake (English/French) for KahnawÃ:ke
>Errr - didn't the Emglish/French useage predate the Mohawk alphabet?  Pretty perverse 
> case there. 

Not as such. The previous English/French spelling of the community was Caughnawaga, 
pronounced in the local English as [kÉgnÇwÉgÇ]. As society has changed somewhat, 
there has been a trend for Canadian society to go back to using the original Native 
names (which the Native people have been using all along). So what happened was, the 
government looked at the way the Mohawk name was already spelled "in Mohawk", 
KahnawÃ:ke [kÉhnÉwÉÌËke], and modified it to suit English/French orthographical 
practice. My point here was that the Mohawk language uses a grave accent and long 
vowel marker, which are discarded in English and French. Today, the local English 
speakers still by and large call the town Caughnawaga, but the English speakers call 
the golf course (which uses the new name) [kÃnÇwÃki]. So for people living in that 
part of QuÃbec, you could say that the word Kanawake is treated like Paris.

Chris Harvey
languagegeek.com



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