Alzrius
The EN World kitten
Kavon said:Actually, that's not what I said. I said that they are known to pronounce things wrong because they transliterate it first. Tien becomes Ten (sky/heaven/etc) - it sounds similar, but it's not quite it.
The problem with that idea is that it holds that any language that has its roots in another language is a corruption of that original language, instead of being a separate one. The English equivalent of that would be like saying that we don't use the original Latin for a lot of our Latin-based words, and as such we're pronouncing them wrong because we've transliterated them to English.
I know full well that there are Japanese people who can speak other languages with great proficiency, but I also know how a majority doesn't bother and just reads the transliteration - nothing wrong with that, but if you want to go into semantics about which name is the correct one (like you did), it becomes a bit more important, don't you think?
No, because I'm talking about which one is correct in the context of the Japanese language. Going back to the word's original derivation in another language won't help if you want to know the correct way to pronounce or otherwise utilize it in Japanese.
Not Shen Long, Xing Long (probably doesn't matter much, but that's what it is).
The way they pronounce the characters has little to do with it.. because that's not how they pronounce those kanji (like I showed in my first post on this derailment).
That is how they pronounce the kanji, just in Japan and not in China, and that doesn't make the Japanese version of the word less correct.
Like I said earlier, I wasn't calling the entire Japanese people poor foreign language speakers, I was just saying that when they transliterate words from foreign languages, certain details will be lost, making for the pronunciation of that word to faulty compared to the original - similar, but not quite it. If they studied the original language and all that, I'm sure they'd have little problem (if it was similar enough - I can't pronounce Chinese Mandarin right at all, though if I'd practice it'd get better - a Japanese person would probably be able to do it right if not transliterated).
This goes back to what I was saying above. Different cultures have their own way of reading characters and pronouncing letters, and when using words (especially names) in another culture, there'll be a different way of pronouncing/reading them that is correct for that culture. All of Japanese is not a corrupted version of the Chinese language.
For what it's worth, I think we Westerners also suck in our pronunciation - in general - when it comes to Chinese and such, not because we can't, but because of the transliteration.
Hm.. As such, I was criticizing transliterations as a whole, not Japanese people and their usage of it in specific. I was just trying to explain (a little awkwardly) that if U_K should use a correct term, he'd have to use the Chinese one instead of the Japanese transliteration (IMnotalwayssohumbleitseemssorrysorryO).
Fair enough. I just was also pointing out that it can be correct in the Japanese also.
I can see that I might've chosen some words wrong, and picked at things that didn't need picking, but that's something I can't change now, only clarify. Sorry if I seem like a jerk or anything, Alzrius. :3
It's cool. I may have been a bit overzealous myself.