Re: new Klingon spelling

Axiem wrote:
> Actually, it now very much aggravates me when people mispronounce Japanese
> words. Whenever I speak and use a native Japanese word, I make sure to
> actually pronounce it correctly. Not necessarily with a Japanese accent, but
> I don't horribly misread the romaji. The primary three instances of this I
> can think of are "sake", "geisha", and "karaoke"
How is "geisha" pronounced in English other than /gejS@/?, which seems
to me to be a pretty reasonably close approximation.  The only other
possibility I can think of that people might use is /gajS@/, but I've
never heard that.

. That last one irritates me
> to no end whenever I hear it said "carry-okee".
Well, English doesn't normally have final unstressed /e/, and /ao/ is
also a foreign diphthong.  Something like /karaokej/ would sound very
bizarre to me, even tho it comes very close to the Japanese
pronunciation.

Tho, given the origin, perhaps it should be "karaorkee"  ;-)  (Karaoke <
kara "empty" + oke, abbr. of ookesutoraa, "orchestra")

But, for what it's worth, I do tend to use things like /kAmikA(d)ze/.
But, "karaoke", I always use the English pronunciation, because the
Japanese is so far different that I suspect most people wouldn't know
what I was talking about if I used it!  :-)

From the opposite perspective, a friend of mine who visited Japan
related a time when she was at a restaurant and asked for "orange juice
kudasai", and the waiter couldn't understand her, until she used the
katakana form _orenji juusu_

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