RogueNoodles said:
"Brack & White"

Hehe... I know it shouldn't, but that killed me...

Akhkharu said:
Yeah I never understood how an "L" in pronouncing a word or name is rendered in print as an "R", for example Kirara in printed form (from Inuyasha anime) is pronounced as Key-lah-lah

Kiho said:

Akhkharu said:
Yeah I never understood how an "L" in pronouncing a word or name is rendered in print as an "R", for example Kirara in printed form (from Inuyasha anime) is pronounced as Key-lah-lah

That would be a question for someone who can speak Japanese. I know that Japanese Hiragana symbols except for the consonant 'N' have pronunciations that are expressed as English Consonant-Vowel pairs and there is a 'ra' sound among them. There is also a 'ki'.

Onmyoujin said:

Kiho said:
That would be a question for someone who can speak Japanese. I know that Japanese Hiragana symbols except for the consonant 'N' have pronunciations that are expressed as English Consonant-Vowel pairs and there is a 'ra' sound among them. There is also a 'ki'.

In Japanese, the "R" sound is what linguists refer to as a "flopped R". It's made by pressing the tip of the tongue against the edge of the hard palate, right next to the soft palate, roughly in the center of the top of your mouth, and then vocalizing. It should produce a sound somewhere between an R and an L. There is actually no L sound in Japanese, so it's approximated with the flopped R where it appears in foreign words, like black.

Interesting fun fact: because of this, Japanese speakers that are not introduced to languages that distinguish between the two sounds early enough are generally unable to hear the difference between an R and an L even when pronounced by a speaker that can clearly express the different sounds.

Mod:comments merged

Kiho said:
Thanx Onmyoujin. That also explains some of the difficulty a fellow student (Japanese) was having in a Russian language class I attended last year as Russian has an L and a R - and both are soft as compared to English L and R. He was very difficult for me to understand - especially since for both of us Russian is a second language.