Failed attempt at English-sounding word

[Douglas G. Wilson]

>The katakana indicate that the Japanese pronunciation
>is "surunguru"; apparently during the series vowels
>are shortened in an attempt to approximate correctly
>pronouncing Srungle.

A great imaginary-English name, all right.

The kana would be transliterated "suranguru", I think; this is how an
'English' word "srungle" /srVNg at l/ would be written in kana, but it would
also serve for 'English' "srangle", "slangle", "slungle" (each of these
having "ng" /Ng/ like in "anger") and a few other things. Compare "suranpu"
= "slump" and "anguru" = "angle". I don't know whence the weird name, but
possibly it incorporates mispronounced English words such as "ranger" or
"angel" taken from writing, and/or something like "slammer" misheard or
misremembered, or something like an acronym in Japanese/Anglo-Japanese.
Although "r" and "l" are virtually indistinguishable and often confused in
Anglo-Japanese, the English terminal "-er" tends to be written "-aa"
instead of "-uru" which serves for "-le" (to simplify a little). The middle
kana trio "rangu" spells (in Japanese) adopted words for both lung ["lung"
from English] and language ["langue" from French] according to the dictionary.

I was just reading an old book about Japan, with foreigners' spellings of
Japanese words such as "sekf", apparently for "sekkufu" = "seasonal
festival", and "Sikokf", for Shikoku. The Japanese "u" tends to
'disappear', especially when no voiced phoneme is adjacent.

Apparently the "Srungle" anime, starring a giant armed robot, had not only
linguistic subtleties but also sentimental human touches. From Usenet:

<<Srungle ... was bad. ... Maybe it might of been better if they didn't
spend so much time on the blonde girl .... Half the episode would be spent
on close-ups of her chest or ass. Her name in Japanese? "Sekkushi" or
"Sexy". I checked the credits to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding her
name.>>

-- Doug Wilson