Thanks, Iain, for taking the time to reply. I appreciate that.

It just seems to me, with my two visits to Japan and also my taking lots of Japanese classes, that katakana is not a very effective way to represent foreign- language words because there is not a decent capability for one-to-one correspondence of letter sounds.

We have a Nihonmachi in San Francisco, where I live. For the streets running through it, the street signs carry katakana transliterations of street names. I find it comical that Webster has to be written as "we bu su tah." If I had not known that the street name were Webster, and saw only "Webusutah," I would wonder, What the heck is Webusutah?