Re: Mono-ii is not actually mono-ii?

[Syd Hoare <syd-hoare@judo-sumo-london.com>]

Hi all,
Your Japanese speaking correspondents have made it pretty clear that it is as I
suggested - namely that at objection is made and a conference follows. I suppose
the word monoii and its incorrect  translation(pow-wow) etc roll off the tongue
easily and make a nice little hook for TV commentators.  It is also easy to see
how any Japanese would not have picked up the incorrect usage among English
speakers........"it's a monoii....." they would interpret that as "there has
been an objection...." which of course there would have been.  So hopefully this
one has been laid to rest.
As for prolonged vowels in names(diacritical mark) its the academics that always
use them but as a word gets commonly used in other languages ie sumo, judo,
Tokyo etc etc the man in the street does not and they go into common parlance as
such.  Also of course if your writing machine does not have the facility to mark
them they get missed out. One way the Japanese write an extended vowel in
alphabet is to add 'u' so kyougi is the same as kyogi with a line drawn over the
'o'.  In some of the early explanations of the word sumo you will see
discussions on the word sumafu but this is merely a direct transliteration of
the old  kana way of writing sumau/sumou/sumo. I am sure that Japanese speakers
among you will be aware of this.
I checked out the dates on the beginnings of student ama-sumo in Japan. The
founder of Judo ( Jigoro Kano)  was the first chairman of the Japan Physical
Education Society and the first Japanese IOC representative.  He was very active
in promoting  Japanese amateur 'sports' such as judo and sumo. Another of his
positions was Head of the Tokyo High School Teachers Training School(I am not
totally sure what sort of school this was - it might be similar to the French
Ecole Normale Superieur) and in this role he proposed the inclusion of sumo in
school physical education programmes(1900). From then on student sumo developed
gradually all over. The Japan Sumo Federation was formed in 1946.  The actual
development of non-professional sumo is actually much more complex and has a
much longer history than I have outlined above and is very interesting.  However
just something to whet the appetite.
Ijo
Syd
ShiroiKuma wrote:

> Interesting point comes out of the discussion of mono-ii. Syd Hoare has long
> been preparing coherent and exact English-language rules for sumo. What he
> pointed out some time ago is that mono-ii is actually a misnomer, since what
> we tend to think of as mono-ii and what the English sumo commentators on TV
> call mono-ii, is actually kyogi.
>
> Quote Syd:
> With regard to Monoii I always thought it meant the discussion in the ring
> but I
> discovered it actually means objection so Monoii (objection) is what happens
> when the judge sticks his hand up and then kyogi is what happens in the
> ring.
> Unquote Syd.
>
> Now, I don't know. But it seems that this might be just an English thing. So
> that it got mixed up. What do the native Japanese speakers use? And should
> it really be kyogi? Anyone on the list know?
>
> Later,
>
> ShiroiKuma
> F
> ShiroiKuma@ShiroiKuma.com
> ICQ#: 33474001
>
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