Comments on: The Difficulty Of Names

By: Gabi Swangstue

Gabi Swangstue — Sun, 24 Nov 2013 09:45:00 +0000

I’m currently in Japan and my given name is Gabrielle. That right there, Gabrielle, is a hard name for anyone here to pronounce! The l’s and the r get jumbled and thrown through a loop! I decided it was best to go by nickname from back home of Gabi. Just my luck, it’s translates perfectly into Katakana without a fuss. It’s still pronounced weirdly but it’s much better than what it would have been with Gabrielle!

By: Vincenza Vicky Maione

Vincenza Vicky Maione — Thu, 31 Oct 2013 10:45:00 +0000

Look, Italians say Jo-n… I think it’s because the “o” an American Native speaker pronounces is slightly different, close to an /a/ but still a /o/ (maybe an allophone..) To us you sound as /ɔ/,so we say /dʒɔn/.
I’ve looked it up, according to English dictionaries the IPA transcription is /jon/, but according to Us English dictionary it is /ˈdʒɑn/ (http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/american-english/john?q=John#). It may be due to a misreading (i mean, the non-native reads the word according to their personal way to perceive the sounds, reading /o/ instead of /ɑ/ in the case of “John”: this happens a lot with Italians saying English names). But, /ɑ/ is really in-between our /o/ and /a/ – I’m talking as an Italian, but it’s the same for Japanese too since the 2 phonetic inventories are similar. So we do not perceive your /ɑ/ unless some teacher taught us the difference. Take a foreigner (also a Spanish native would be fine I guess) and try and teach him the “john” thing: I think they’ll come up either with /a/ or /o/, because they have not been trained to recognize the phone.
This is at the base of the very bad accent of the majority of foreigners when they perform in English (or in any other foreign language).
Starting from the perception, it may be that the Japanese came out with that katakana: the katakana became socially accepted, and it is now the standard to design American Pizza. As I said, American pizza was imported to Japan first, then the Italian one came to be known. But as Prof. Calvetti claims in his studio, in the 50s the Japanese didn’t pay much attention to the accuracy of the phonetic traslitteration of words, reproducing words more closely familiar to their phonetic inventory. That’s why spaghetti was first pronounced as supagechi, then gradually corrected to supagetti. The word became popular through the decades and the Japanese probably felt the need to correct their way to say it. It may be – I’m just guessing – that the introduction of the Italian pizza gave the Japanese the need to correct their pronunciation according to a more “Italian” performance of the world, but this did not eliminate the “old” word which was used only for the Us variety.
No doubt something is different from the Italian pronunciation –> /’pits:a/ and the Us English /ˈpit·sə/. So, since the word is Italian, why don’t you Americans say it right? may I say. lol
I think the Japanese perceived a /z/ instead of a geminate /ts/, and I myself perceive a difference in the strenght of the geminate and in the vowels (though it also depends on the speaker I think). It’s a much deeper issue, and I don’t think they just make up the new pronunciations, besides, as a non-native speaker of English I also think that you don’t realize how hard it is to cope with a new phonetic inventory, especially a hard one like Chinese or English, if you are a native speaker…
Anyways, I am not a researcher and make mistakes myself, so I am happy to hear from others and eventually to learn something new ^^

*Just realized I repeated myself with the spaghetti thing, sorry*

By: linguarum

linguarum — Tue, 22 Oct 2013 17:10:00 +0000

It’s not that the Japanese don’t have the phones in their language system. It’s that when they do, they pick the “wrong” one. :-) Japanese does have the sound /ja/, as well as the sound /jo/. So when it comes to the name “John,” why choose /jo/? On the other hand, if I choose to use katakana that more closely resembles the way I pronounce it as a native speaker, am I wrong? Especially as your “pizza” example shows, everybody is just making up katakana as they go, so it’s not like anyone can really insist that one way is Right and the other is Wrong. BTW, funny, but as a native speaker of American English. I’ve always pronounced it PEET-za.

By: Enidちゃん

Enidちゃん — Sat, 07 Sep 2013 03:51:00 +0000

I’m not a dog lover but Inu’s are just soo cute!! :3 They might change my mind about dogs. >^__^<

By: confusedann

confusedann — Mon, 02 Sep 2013 02:48:00 +0000

My name is Ann Cheska , but I prefer using Cheska over Ann since it’s way cooler than plain Ann. Americans have a weird way of considering a person’s second first name , the middle name , so my American BF’s grandmother calls me “Annie”. LOL I always get confused but I’m too shy to correct her. XD

By: Spekko

Spekko — Thu, 29 Aug 2013 03:48:00 +0000

I had no idea I had an account! And he I was going to post as a guest, but anyways… While I’ve been learning Japanese, I’ve realized that I really dislike the way my name, “Alexander” is translated. Partly the spelling, and partly just the slightly different pronunciation, so instead