Toledo

[macmaster at RISEUP.NET]

Japanese doesn't distinguish between /r/ & /l/ (sort of like some
languages with /w/ & /v/) so both godzira and godzila would be the same in
Japanese.

Leonard Blunk wrote:
> No but American and European audiences do so we tend to use God-zilla as
> opposed to God-zira.  Then too there is that uppity attitude that since
> they lost the war and we won, we have some kind of right to disrespect
> their language. DR. ORIENT ROHMER
>
>
> ualarauans <ualarauans at yahoo.com> wrote: --- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com,
> macmaster at ... wrote:
>>
>>
>> Why couldn't they be borrowed in the way that modern English has
>>
> borrowed
>> words with sounds not found in it?
> ie., 'qat', 'hannukah', 'challah',
>> 'sheikh', etc ...
>>
>
> But English doesn't pronounce these words exactly as they are
> pronounced in the donor languages. Their sounds are anyway adapted to the
> phonetic skills of English speakers. And besides, these loans were made
> into a worldwide spoken language with a millennium-long tradition of
> writing and opportunities to take the new words directly and to spell them
> after the existing conditional transliterations. E.g. you don't pronounce
> the second /h/ in Hanukkah? Just imagine what would have become of
> Hanukkah or sheikh
> in a language spoken mostly by illiterate peasants, like Vulgar Latin was,
> without a lasting intercourse with Hebrew resp. Arab speakers. Or what
> would be the result if English would have taken sheikh from a language
> which has no [sh] sound and substitutes it regularly with [s]. You'd have
> now *seikh.
>
> BTW, does anyone know why they say Godzilla, not Godzira after the
> Japanese pronunciation (Japanese has no [l] sound)?
>
>
> Ualarauans
>
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