Shut up, just shut up

[beatniknight]

I was having a conversation (argument, really) with my friend about Final Fantasy 3, so maybe it was my own fault.

The whole time, I was saying things that he was disagreeing with and he was talking about things that are blatantly not present in Final Fantasy 3 (crazy shit like gusts of wind that prevent you taking your airship to some nonexistent

Comments

[beatniknight]

Well, I believe that the reason for this is that Akira is a name, with a certain real pronunciation. This has nothing to do with pretention, it's just how it's pronounced, like Wagner is pronounced Vagner, and we would consider someone who didn't know this to be a hillbilly.

As for "karate," that word has passed over into the English language (like "liaison" to which we pronounce the "n") and is now no longer considered a foreign word (you can use it in Scrabble). So, when we hear someone (an English speaking someone)pronouncing a now-English word like "karate" with a non-English inflection it seems put on, and it is. He was probably (we assume) taught to say it "-tee" not "-tay" and it's not a natural slip, it's affected. Much like the "slip" from 3-6 in my example or from appartment to flat, "-tay" is an attempt by the speaker to make it appear more interesting because he knows how another culture pronounces a word or what word signifier they use to describe what signified. However, we (or at least I do) find this annoying (or humorous) because we know that the speaker is no more interesting for knowing this at all (indeed, we know it too) but is in fact probably less so because he feels the need to distinguish himself in this artificial way. Nothing hypocritical in your response at all, the two situations are different.