Wow, I didn't even know this thread existed.
Bless you,
@ayase; I'm truly pleased that those insights are of value to you. I very much like the Japanese language, so it's very easy to want to share.
You make a very good point about voiceless consonants in Romanisation and how they can play havoc with pronunciation. I guess the intent behind it is standardisation of format, something that we'll never really achieve, in all honesty. Like, the nasal consonant
n changes its sound depending on the following one, but do you chose to represent this in the Romanisation? Is it best to type
senpai or
sempai? Should it be c
onpyuutaa or
compyuutaa for "computer"?
It's the same with long vowel sounds. Is it best to represent them with a bar above the letter, or by doubling up the letter itself? In other words, do you respond more to seeing
yūki or
yuuki? Better acknowledge the extended vowel sound either way, because otherwise you change "courage" into "snow"!
But going back to unvoiced consonants, I remember the first time I saw Isao Takahata's
Little Norse Prince on Film4. Throughout the film, the main character's name was being rendered as Horus in the subtitles. The translator had heard the pronunciation of it, "Horusu", and removed that rogue voiceless "u" on the end and run with that.
But it's wrong. In this case, the "ru" was standing in for our "L" sound, so it should actually be Hols. Converting something like an obscure name like Hols into Japanese phonetics is a trivial matter; converting it back into its original form and trying to figure out how it should be rendered, on the other hand, is not always so easy.
I know that the "u" in "ru"
is voiced, so that moved somewhat off-topic part of the way through there, but... a bit of trivia and insight nonetheless, I hope.
I totally take your point, ayase, about how destroying the grammar of the target language could actually potentially
aid in getting to grips with the source, and there's indeed a lot to be said for that. I think, perhaps, that that's actually a bit more of an
advanced-level technique — suitable for people who have already been able to get their head around how the syntax of Japanese sentences is different from English (subject<>object–verb as opposed to subject–verb–object) and who are comfortable with deconstructing those separate parts.
That deconstruction is very suited to Japanese, actually. There's a part of Hayao Miyazaki's film
The Wind Rises where the main character breaks down his sentences into their natural sections to aid the understanding of a non-native speaker. This is much more possible in Japanese than it is in English, to my mind, so I think that if you're already willing and able to dismantle and rearrange the components, then that's a good sign.
Forgive me for going on for so long here, but it's a fascinating subject, and enthusiasm might've gotten the better of me!
Extra points for the
Altered Beast clip, btw.
Omae wa mo shinde iru
Omae wa mou shinde iru
