I came across an interesting word today. Chanbara (or chambara since Japanese romanization isn't exactly fixed) is a samurai movie genre (mainly post-war) focused on drama rather than action. There's even an International Sports Chanbara Association!

The Wikipedia article is here.

Nice word! It's interesting that when you read about words, you learn about others. I found jidaigeki to be an interesting word and one I've not heard. Then that Wikipedia article used one of my favorite words, swashbuckler.

quote:

Then that Wikipedia article used one of my favorite words, swashbuckler.

Do they constrain swashplates?

I hadn't known much about swashbuckler, but Quinion talks about it here.

I would guess that in Japanese that it wouldn't be called "chambara" as they don't have an "m" sound all by its lonesome like that, though they do have a stand alone "n" sound. If it were an "m" it would have to be "chya-ma-ba-ra." But, the m and the n sound very similar to non-Japanese ears, I suppose.

Good find!

Lala

In the Hepburn romanization system for Japanese, a syllable final n is written as an m before syllables that begin with a bilabial (i.e., p or b): e.g., chambara. (AFAIK, this represents the pronunciation of the phoneme /n/ as the allophone [m] before bilabials and as the allophone [ŋ] before velars.) Hepburn is not an official romanization system, but Kunrei-shiki romanization is. In this system, closer to how Japanese words are written in Hiragana, the n is always written n. One would do well not to confuse pronunciation with writing system (or spelling in languages such as English). The Hiragana glyphs for he, ha, and wo are not transcribed according to where they fall within the syllabary, but how they are pronounced in Japanese , currently: i.e., the particles e, wa, and [i]o/i].