Eheeeheeheee. I did the same thing to a friend of mine - one of my MSTings pointed out the very unfortunate name of a certain character. She wanted to know why this was funny. She blames me for the brain scars.
My actual first name means "fog" in Japanese. Unfortunately, when I was one of the foreign retweeters helping with the 2009 Iranian protests, I discovered that it means 'penis' in Farsi.
THIS. Honestly one of the only systems I really like is Pinyin. It handles the different consonants pretty well and it's easy enough to match up the voiced vs. unvoiced pairs of sounds. The way it represents tones in things like learning books is also very nice? It's very easy to remember the tone classification system based off Pinyin's style of tone marking. As much as English speakers who spend no time learning the system bitch about it it's kind of a marvel for what it does. It's still not a replacement for learning zi but it's pretty good at displaying the phonemic features of Chinese without making me wish for death. The y thing REALLY pisses me off in particular. Please just find two letters for й and ы because these are not fucking interchangeable. I also wish there were a way to really get across that Russian x is not English h. Like yes they both fall into the category of "h sounds", but they're different? The x is more akin to the Haa of Arabic or the ch of Irish because they are literally that exact same phoneme: the voiceless velar fricative. Our English h is instead the voiceless glottal fricative typically. That incidentally is also my issue with the f and h used for ふ in Japanese. It's not the same as our English f but at the same time h is also not on the ball. It's the voiceless bilabial fricative. It doesn't really matter THAT much I guess because it's not like Japanese has like four fricatives in that general area that need to be distinguished between and the the voiceless labiodental fricative is typically close enough. But I just don't like it dammit. I JUST DON'T. IT LEADS TO WEIRD ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT THE SOUND. I can live with the h and f of these two methods though I guess so long as we're not telling people they're the same as the typical English versions of h and f. Which I've not seen someone do with Japanese in a long while but I've recently come across someone saying Russian x and English h are the same sound and I just want to eat them.
This reminds me. While it's more a writing peeve than a fic peeve in particular I don't like when people use "kh" and other similarly abused consonants and consonant clusters without a logic to it. Like I suppose that Khaazagaz or whatever looks more FANTASY because of the h but what is the kh. Is it an aspirated voiceless velar stop? Is it a voiceless velar fricative or perhaps the voiceless postvelar fricative? Is the k there being lenited? Why is the h there. What is it doing. Why do you also use just k in initial positions like that too. What are the differences. Why do I feel like there isn't one. As awkward as the script for Mando'a can be at times with shit like yc being akin to English -is except for when it is a hard k at least it's consistent in its rules. Yes even the seemingly awkward and random differences in the yc are very systematic. The seemingly random apostrophes also have a distinctive logic to them. They either represent glottal stops or serve as a grammatical marker signifying that two words have been joined into a singular word. So in otherwords Aon is a very picky bitch about her fantasy names and will always be upset.
On the topic of names, in a fandom where one set of characters tend to have names composed of unflattering physical descriptions, "Blackface" might be an accurate name for a masked ferret but in the readership's context it's just a tad unfortunate.
This is why I continue to feel incredibly weird whenever Tori's nickname is mentioned. He's called the Black Lord, which is often shortened to Blackie. And that is just kind of...ertgh to me.
I actually love japanese because the sounds are very very very almost exactly the same damn thing as brazilian portuguese, but i just can't get over my difficulty with the writing system and it makes me a sad
Actually, no. If the POV character understands what's being said, translate it, but if they don't, tell us what they're hearing, which doesn't have to be linguistically friggin' precise.
Japanese has lovingly simple phonology. It's a bit complicated by the phonetics, but even then it's pretty simple still. And awww. I personally really like the writing system of Japanese for linguistic reasons as well as it's not that hard for me to pick up. I can definitely get it being a huge barrier to many though. Even after learning what radicals are and some of the other specifics of how it all works a lot of people struggle with memorizing that many characters.
Yes! Give us the same comprehension that the character is getting. Like, there's some Hobbit/LotR fic I love that use Khuzdul and Sindarin and Quenya very enthusiastically. They give a mouseover translation, which is great if I'm reading on my computer. If I'm on my phone? Welp. I sure recognize words for "beloved" and various family terms on sight.
Now I am getting all warm and fuzzy about how I love how zi are structured and read in Chinese. It's just such a lovely little system and yeah there's lots of characters to learn, but the characters are built with that difficulty in mind. -hugs chinese- why didnt i bother studying you until recently
PT-BR has more sounds than japanese, because consonants and vowel tones and linguistic things i'm not nearly competent enough to comment, but their a is our a and their e is our e; english was a lot harder for me to pick up because at the best case scenario your a is our ey and at the worst, who knows. i've been studying english for like 20 years and my pronnunciation is still atrocious but i just can't remember anything more complicated than hiragana. it's just a long, loud train noise when i get to kanji which brings me to a fanfic pet peeve: people who dont run their overwatch Lúcio through a Certified Brazilian (tm)
I'm pretty sure we actually agree! I don't mind using a little bit of transliteration to establish that a different, unknown language is being used, I just think it's easier and flows better to just say in the narration that the POV character doesn't understand what's being said, instead of long sentences of transliteration. I think it's confusing. If the reader is supposed to know it, put it in the same language as the rest. If they aren't, don't write out the dialogue, is my opinion.
I can only imagine that the Lúcio stuff is as horrid as the stuff I've seen with Reaper. Gods. Anyway, yeah English is kind of a horrid clusterfuck. We're a lot more consistent than claimed, but the issue is that our consistency is in rules and those rule sets are dealing with some very distinct groups of shit. Like our rules for dealing with French based words are pretty on the spot, but they aren't the same as the ones we apply to native English words or to loan words from languages other than French. It's made all the weirder when we have like...two different theories on how to deal with them running at the same time. So you have names like Aisling keeping their native Irish spelling right next to whatever in the fuck shillelagh is supposed to be but because of years of confusing Anglicization Ethniu is still being presented as Enya or Ethne even though they are given the same pronunciation value. So while our rules are consistent we have multiple warring rulesets that are constantly competing for dominance. And sometimes those rulesets conflict horribly, as like the issue with Irish. At least this is the impression I am gathering after looking into it more. So in short our orthography is fucking bullshit. I love it because it is and it's just such a fascinating mess. But it's fucking bullshit. I like to put translations for that sort of thing in notes at the end of the work in question. I really dislike using strings of language like that without providing translation, but I also find it messy to have be in like...the middle of the text? It just doesn't look right to me and looks more like someone annotated my writing after I finished it. Mouseover translation sounds really neat though and I want to learn how to do it? Since it would solve my issues with making the text look ugly but also the issue on the reader's side where they'd have to be scrolling to the bottom notes constantly or something.
Having both is the optimal method, since I can't begrudge people who want to show off their conlang prowess. I'm not sure it's done, but the particular fic I'm thinking of is on AO3.
