How do I pronounce タ三ア in Japanese?
A friend of mine who knows I am learning Japanese got me the very adorable bilingual book "Am I small?" (”私、小さい”）In English the main character is called Tamia so I would assume that 三 would be pronounced "mi" but I can't seem to find a good source on this. If context helps the first sentence in the book is "この 子 が タ三ア。” The English sentence being "This is Tamia." So than the Japanese version would basically mean "This child is Tamia." if I'm reading it correctly. Is this correct?
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Answers · 7
2
You(and we) can not pronounce"タ三ア". "三" is kanji(Chinese character) means "three". "三" should be "ミ"(katakana). Then you(and we) can pronounce"タミア<tamia>".
Young Buddhist priests took basically a part of the kanji and used it as a phonogram in order to write down quickly lecture of teacher in 9th century. In most, on-yomi was used, but there are several katakana that kun-yomi<the Japanese reading＝Japanese translation> was used. ミ<mi> is one of them. The letterform of "ミ" has come from "三".
"この 子 が／は タミア。" means "This child is Tamia".
0
み is a kun'yomi reading for the Kanji 三, so yes, that could be pronounced tamia
0
Everything you said in your question is correct. The romanji for the sentence is "kono ko ga Tamia"
For foreign words or names they use the katakana alphabet; the characters in Tamia are katakana. The rest is the hiragana alphabet, except for ko, which is kanji.
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