Pronounciating Japanese Words-A Minor Rant in the Key of C
You know what's weird? Karaoke. The word, not the activity. The activity is gold plated awesome, especially the way they do it in Japan, where you go into a private room with your friends, waitresses bring you snacks and drinks, and you sing to your heart's content without embarrassing yourself in front of strangers. The American way of getting drunk enough to do it in a bar full of strangers is fun, too, of course. Especially if you are there with a group of friends, and can encourage each other, laugh a lot, and take turns buying rounds.
But the thing that's weird is the word itself. The original Japanese word, karaoke カラオケ, is a portmanteau of Japanese kara 空 "empty," and ōkesutora オーケストラ "orchestra"* It's pronounced in Japanese roughly as kah-rah-oh-keh. But take it into American English and it somehow magically transmutes into care-ee-oak-ee. I can see where the first and third syllables come from, and if I squint, the fourth. But that second? Seriously? In what universe is the unstressed vowel 'a' pronounced as ee?
It's just weird, you know? Of course a lot of words come into English from foreign lands and have their pronunciation radically messed about. Most native English speakers really screw with Japanese words and names, for example, because in English the norm is to put the stress on the penultimate (next to last) syllable, while in Japanese, there is usually little to no discernible stress, and what stress there is usually falls on the first syllable. So, for example, the Japanese word sakura 桜（サクラ）meaning cherry blossom, and sometimes used as a girl's name, in Japanese sounds like SAH-koo-rah. English speakers mangle it to sah-KOO-rah.
Or take the city of Osaka 大阪（おおさか）Now one problem is that from the standard method of writing the city name in English, you can't tell that that's a long O at the start. In Japanese, there is the concept of a double vowel, which means you say it a little longer. So it's OHH-sah-kah. But in English it turns into oh-SAH-kah.
And then there's the oh-so-tricky concept of the ellided syllable. In Japanese when the syllable 'su' shows up in the middle of a word, like in the name Sasuke, and sometimes when it shows up at the beginning, like in the word sukiyaki, the u becomes this almost invisible little ghost of itself. So those words are roughly SAH-skay, and skee-yah-kee. But way, way too often, (like for example during the Olympics or other international sports programs), the American announcers call an athlete named Sasuke 'sah-SOO-kee'. Which just grates on my ears. Or if you go to a restaurant and want some delicious stewed beef and vegetables in a slightly sweet, soy-based sauce, the Japanese-speaking waitress looks at you like 'OMG are you from Mars? You're white, you're supposed to say soo-kee-YAH-kee, not pronounce it correctly!'
And then there is sake, that wonderful rice-based alcoholic beverage often translated as rice-wine. SAH-keh, in Japanese. Americans call it sah-kee. In fact, both karaoke and sake have made it into the dictionary. They aren't foreign words anymore, they are part of English. And in both cases, my dictionary lists only the standard American pronunciations for each of them.
sake |ˈsäkē| (also saki or saké)
noun
a Japanese alcoholic drink made from fermented rice, traditionally drunk warm in small porcelain cups.
ORIGIN Japanese.
karaoke |ˌkarēˈōkē|
noun
a form of entertainment, offered typically by bars and clubs, in which people take turns singing popular songs into a microphone over prerecorded backing tracks.
ORIGIN 1970s: from Japanese, literally ‘empty orchestra.’
It's a two-way street of course. English words taken into Japanese suffer terribly, because Japanese has fewer sounds than English, and no consonant clusters. So, for example, orange juice in Japanese sounds something like oh-ren-jee-jyoo-soo. Baseball becomes bay-soo-bah-roo. And there's the above mentioned orchestra, which becomes the unrecognizable oh-keh-soo-toh-rah. But English doesn't lack the phonemes** to properly handle Japanese words, like Japanese lacks for English. So the excuse is a little flimsier for English's manhandling of Japanese words.
A lot of the blame lies in the way we write Japanese words in the English alphabet, which leaves much to be desired. There are undoubtedly whole doctoral theses written on the various inadequacies of the differing Romanization schemes for Japanese. But anyway. If you see me cringe when you pronounce Umino Iruka's name as you-MEAN-oh ear-ROO-kah, this is why. A few years of Japanese study and I still have shitty vocabulary and can barely read one hundred kanji, but I can pronounce it. OO-me-noh EE-roo-kah.
Now I'm gonna go play some Karaoke Revolution on my PS2. Anyone want to join me?
* from Wiki's entry on karaoke
** phoneme: the perceptually distinct units of sound in a specified language that distinguish one word from another, for example p, b, d, and t in the English words pad, pat, bad, and bat.
Thankful for: A friend's mom being okay despite a medical scare, Japanese tea, Wayne's birthday today, my ear for the sounds of languages, a peaceful day
But the thing that's weird is the word itself. The original Japanese word, karaoke カラオケ, is a portmanteau of Japanese kara 空 "empty," and ōkesutora オーケストラ "orchestra"* It's pronounced in Japanese roughly as kah-rah-oh-keh. But take it into American English and it somehow magically transmutes into care-ee-oak-ee. I can see where the first and third syllables come from, and if I squint, the fourth. But that second? Seriously? In what universe is the unstressed vowel 'a' pronounced as ee?
It's just weird, you know? Of course a lot of words come into English from foreign lands and have their pronunciation radically messed about. Most native English speakers really screw with Japanese words and names, for example, because in English the norm is to put the stress on the penultimate (next to last) syllable, while in Japanese, there is usually little to no discernible stress, and what stress there is usually falls on the first syllable. So, for example, the Japanese word sakura 桜（サクラ）meaning cherry blossom, and sometimes used as a girl's name, in Japanese sounds like SAH-koo-rah. English speakers mangle it to sah-KOO-rah.
Or take the city of Osaka 大阪（おおさか）Now one problem is that from the standard method of writing the city name in English, you can't tell that that's a long O at the start. In Japanese, there is the concept of a double vowel, which means you say it a little longer. So it's OHH-sah-kah. But in English it turns into oh-SAH-kah.
And then there's the oh-so-tricky concept of the ellided syllable. In Japanese when the syllable 'su' shows up in the middle of a word, like in the name Sasuke, and sometimes when it shows up at the beginning, like in the word sukiyaki, the u becomes this almost invisible little ghost of itself. So those words are roughly SAH-skay, and skee-yah-kee. But way, way too often, (like for example during the Olympics or other international sports programs), the American announcers call an athlete named Sasuke 'sah-SOO-kee'. Which just grates on my ears. Or if you go to a restaurant and want some delicious stewed beef and vegetables in a slightly sweet, soy-based sauce, the Japanese-speaking waitress looks at you like 'OMG are you from Mars? You're white, you're supposed to say soo-kee-YAH-kee, not pronounce it correctly!'
And then there is sake, that wonderful rice-based alcoholic beverage often translated as rice-wine. SAH-keh, in Japanese. Americans call it sah-kee. In fact, both karaoke and sake have made it into the dictionary. They aren't foreign words anymore, they are part of English. And in both cases, my dictionary lists only the standard American pronunciations for each of them.
sake |ˈsäkē| (also saki or saké)
noun
a Japanese alcoholic drink made from fermented rice, traditionally drunk warm in small porcelain cups.
ORIGIN Japanese.
karaoke |ˌkarēˈōkē|
noun
a form of entertainment, offered typically by bars and clubs, in which people take turns singing popular songs into a microphone over prerecorded backing tracks.
ORIGIN 1970s: from Japanese, literally ‘empty orchestra.’
It's a two-way street of course. English words taken into Japanese suffer terribly, because Japanese has fewer sounds than English, and no consonant clusters. So, for example, orange juice in Japanese sounds something like oh-ren-jee-jyoo-soo. Baseball becomes bay-soo-bah-roo. And there's the above mentioned orchestra, which becomes the unrecognizable oh-keh-soo-toh-rah. But English doesn't lack the phonemes** to properly handle Japanese words, like Japanese lacks for English. So the excuse is a little flimsier for English's manhandling of Japanese words.
A lot of the blame lies in the way we write Japanese words in the English alphabet, which leaves much to be desired. There are undoubtedly whole doctoral theses written on the various inadequacies of the differing Romanization schemes for Japanese. But anyway. If you see me cringe when you pronounce Umino Iruka's name as you-MEAN-oh ear-ROO-kah, this is why. A few years of Japanese study and I still have shitty vocabulary and can barely read one hundred kanji, but I can pronounce it. OO-me-noh EE-roo-kah.
Now I'm gonna go play some Karaoke Revolution on my PS2. Anyone want to join me?
* from Wiki's entry on karaoke
** phoneme: the perceptually distinct units of sound in a specified language that distinguish one word from another, for example p, b, d, and t in the English words pad, pat, bad, and bat.
Thankful for: A friend's mom being okay despite a medical scare, Japanese tea, Wayne's birthday today, my ear for the sounds of languages, a peaceful day