Re: [Lingo] you have got to be kidding

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

steve smith writes:

 > Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

 > > Actually, there's no "fuckin'" in 冗談じゃねぇぞ！  To get that, it
 > > needs to be てめぇ！冗談じゃねぇぞ！
 > Except for や、ゆ、よ、つ, I haven't seen the small kanji
 > like 「ぇ」 before.  What are they??  I noticed I can make
 > them on my dictionary but have no idea how they are created
 > from the IME.

Although the Japanese phonetic repertoire is (often) rather restricted
compared to English or Hindi, almost all Japanese can easily pronounce
a fair number of sounds like fi, fai, fo, and fum, as well as two.  Of
those five, only "fum" can be written in kana (and confusingly enough, 
フムis typically pronounced "hum").  To complete the repertoire, these
kana are often used to indicate that only the consonant of the
preceding kana is pronounced, and instead the small vowel is
substituted.  Thus: フィ ファイ フォ フム and トゥ.  Compounds with W
are often spelled with u:  ウォー！楽しいんだ纔瘢韭絎竢躰！

In hiragana, they are often used rather than the dash to indicate a
long vowel.  Thus テメー but てめぇ.

Another tidbit, IIRC all kana (including archaic ones like ゐ) exist
in mirrored form (in both hira and kana), except for ヴ, which is kata
only.  That means it's impossible to パーレーヴー in hiragana. :-)