Gundam Seed Name
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Halo Sorceress
- Joined: Thu Apr 14, 2005 6:25 pm
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ChronoShadow131
- Joined: Fri Sep 05, 2003 12:26 pm
- Location: Floating through the fourth dimension inside Schrodinger's box
Perhaps. I just find it rather disquieting that the definition of "flay" from the Compact Oxford English Dictionary is "to strip the skin from (a body or carcass), whip or beat harshly, or criticize harshly", depending on your interpretation. It would be akin (at least to me) to naming my kid Scourge. There tends to be unpleasant connotations with that. Ah, well, to each their own.
"We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe."
-Johann von Goethe
-Johann von Goethe
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Solaria735
- Joined: Wed Jan 28, 2004 1:22 pm
- Location: Sacramento
- Contact:
Whew, it's nice having Otohiko around, as I don't have to go into a linguistics rant and type all that up. ^-^ (I'm also a linguistics major.)
I'd like to add, that just as the r/l are pretty interchangeable (usually the sound that is actually produced is somewhere between the standard (American) pronunciation of /r/ and /l/), so are the /s/ and /th/. /th/, a dental fricative, doesn't really exist in the Japanese sound system, so the closest they can get is /s/, an alveolar fricative. So when names are spelled with a /th/, they are usually prounounced with an /s/ in Japanese.
This is the same reason for the debate over the Aeris/Aerith spelling. Her name was intended to be Aerith, but translated over as Aeris in the English version.
I'd like to add, that just as the r/l are pretty interchangeable (usually the sound that is actually produced is somewhere between the standard (American) pronunciation of /r/ and /l/), so are the /s/ and /th/. /th/, a dental fricative, doesn't really exist in the Japanese sound system, so the closest they can get is /s/, an alveolar fricative. So when names are spelled with a /th/, they are usually prounounced with an /s/ in Japanese.
This is the same reason for the debate over the Aeris/Aerith spelling. Her name was intended to be Aerith, but translated over as Aeris in the English version.