{"id":17789,"date":"2019-02-10T09:46:21","date_gmt":"2019-02-10T17:46:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=17789"},"modified":"2019-02-09T20:31:36","modified_gmt":"2019-02-10T04:31:36","slug":"bad-transliterations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2019\/02\/10\/bad-transliterations\/","title":{"rendered":"Bad transliterations"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>I\u2019ve tried a couple of times to start reading William Gibson\u2019s novel <cite>Idoru<\/cite>, but I keep getting too distracted and annoyed by the title to focus on the book.<\/p>\r\n<p>Apparently the title is supposed to represent the Japanese version of the English word <i>idol<\/i>. But the Japanese word that Gibson intended to refer to, the one that\u2019s pronounced similar to <i>idol<\/i>, is written as <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Japanese_idol\">\u30a2\u30a4\u30c9\u30eb<\/a>, which is normally transliterated as <i>aidoru<\/i>. More specifically, those characters are transliterated as <i>a<\/i>, <i>i<\/i>, <i>do<\/i>, and <i>ru<\/i>. This isn\u2019t a matter of different people making different but equally good choices of how to transliterate; if you\u2019re transliterating that word, there\u2019s no good reason to leave out the initial <i>a<\/i>.<\/p>\r\n<p>And that second character, \u30a4 (transliterated as <i>i<\/i>), is pronounced \/i\/, more or less rhyming with the English word <i>bee<\/i>. So if a Japanese word were transliterated as <i>idoru<\/i>, it would be pronounced \/idoru\/, with an <i>ee<\/i> sound at the beginning.<\/p>\r\n<p>So every time I read the word <i>idoru<\/i> in Gibson\u2019s title, I pronounce it to myself with an <i>ee<\/i> sound at the beginning of the word, and then have to remind myself that that\u2019s not how Gibson meant it to be pronounced, and then I get annoyed with Gibson again, and then I get distracted and can\u2019t focus on the book.<\/p>\r\n<p>So if you\u2019re going to use a transliteration of a non-English word as your title, please use the correct transliteration (if there is one).<\/p>\r\n<p>(I gather that Gibson and\/or the publishers made the argument that non-Japanese speakers would see <i>idoru<\/i> and pronounce it correctly. But I can think of several obvious ways that English speakers might pronounce <i>idoru<\/i> that don\u2019t sound anything like <i>idol<\/i>, so I feel like that wasn\u2019t a good argument. Also, the book apparently features AIs, so I feel like spelling it <i>aidoru<\/i> would have been kind of clever.)<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[70,91],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pronunciation","category-translation"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17789"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17789\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17806,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17789\/revisions\/17806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}