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Ancient Chinese?

From:Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...>
Date:Friday, December 25, 1998, 20:42
Hi,
i was looking up something in my dictionary (it happened to be "judea",
to see if it was originally spelled with an {ae} ligature instead of the
E), and i passed by the word "jujitsu".
The dictionary said at the end, for the etymology:

[Japanese /ju-jitsu/ : /ju-/, soft, yielding, from Ancient Chinese
/n'z'i@u/ (Mandarin /jou2/) + /jitsu/, art, from Ancient Chinese
/dz'`iu@t/ (Mandarin /shu4/).]

' = rising accent over previous letter
- = macron over previous letter
` = opening single-quote apostraphe, like the kind used a lot for Semitic
_`ay(i)n_.
/ / = italics

So, does anyone know anything about this?  What are these Ns and Zs with
accentmarks?  And what's a `ayin doing there?

Thanks,


-Stephen (Steg)

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