Katakana in Australia
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From Jim Breen:
Jim explains:
I found myself parked in suburban Melbourne beside a truck with the sign pictured above on its side.
Why "Kong BBQ" felt it was appropriate to have "barbecue" written out in Japanese (バーベキュー [bābekyū]) I cannot imagine. While Japanese is a fairly popular second language here, it doesn't mean that there are masses of people who can actually work out what's on that truck. It also looks as though the sign-writer did a fairly clumsy job of copying the text they'd been given.
Equally puzzling to me (VHM) is why they style themselves "Kong". If you're going to go Japanese for "barbecue", then why not for "Kong" too — either "Kon コン" (as the "Kong" of "Hong Kong" is pronounced in Japanese) or "Kongu コング" (as in " Kingukongu キングコング" ["King Kong"]). Maybe they're just trying to reach as many different segments of the local population as possible, each in their own idiolect.
Johan P said,
July 3, 2017 @ 10:08 am
It could just be the "random asian lettering as visual decoration" trope striking again, AKA the Superdry phenomenon.
phspaelti said,
July 3, 2017 @ 10:46 am
Well if you go to their website it clearly is not "random asian lettering as visual decoration".
The "Kong" just seems to be the company name. They use a Panda as mascot so it is a vaguely "Chinese" company. But they seem to use the Japanese バーベキュー extensively and it looks like it might be to appeal to some Japanese community. The website is linked to several other restaurants which are more obviously linked to Japan (called "Shiki" and "Kisume") and one called "Chin Chin & Go Go" even has an elaborate page with Japanese speaking cartoon figures.
One hint however that "Kongバーベキュー" does not really understand Japanese is that on their webpage the vowel length markers are written horizontally even when they write vertically.
Ethan said,
July 3, 2017 @ 12:28 pm
On the other hand the name of their sushi bar kisumé / キスユメ looks like plausible Japanese ("kiss + dream") that has been mangled by mistransliteration into "English lettering with random foreign-looking accents".
Victor Mair said,
July 3, 2017 @ 12:34 pm
Most of the sushi bars and "Japanese" restaurants around where I live are actually staffed and / or run by Chinese, but they all want you (the American consumer) to think that they are Japanese. So when they meet someone like me who hears them speaking one or another Chinese language and interacts with them in that language, it can be rather embarrassing.
Perhaps that's what's happening with Kong バーベキュー (bābekyū) in Melbourne.
leoboiko said,
July 3, 2017 @ 1:48 pm
Perhaps they were trying to get posted on Languagelog, for the publicity.
Alyssa said,
July 3, 2017 @ 2:25 pm
"It also looks as though the sign-writer did a fairly clumsy job of copying the text they'd been given."
Is this true? It looks alright to me, just stylized.
Kobo Daishi said,
July 3, 2017 @ 4:41 pm
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/09/29/the-fascinating-story-behind-who-opens-sushi-restaurants-and-why/
An article on why so many of America's sushi restaurants are owned by Chinese.
An interesting tidbit from the article, "According to the best estimates, there are more than 40,000 Chinese restaurants in the country, more than the number of U.S. post offices. ".
Matt said,
July 4, 2017 @ 9:04 am
"Kong" is actually a reasonable representation, in English, of the actual pronunciation of コン in isolation (you would expect the last consonant to be an uvular nasal [ɴ]).
Michael Cowell said,
July 4, 2017 @ 10:12 am
I'm a long time reader here but never commented. "Kong" is part of a chain of Asian/Australian fusion restaurants in Melbourne called "The Lucas Group" (website: http://www.thelucasgroup.com.au/). They probably don't need publicity on LL, as there's almost always a wait to get into any of their restaurants.
Different restaurants in the chain are more or less focused on different Asian cuisines. The restaurants seem designed to appeal to the affluent inner city Melbourne restaurant goers, who are quite familiar with Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai and Vietnamese food (at least), rather than those seeking strict authenticity. Melbourne is an very multi-cultural city, especially the Richmond area.
"Kong" (which I usually try and eat at when I'm in Melbourne) has Chinese, Korean and Japanese influences, which (at least to my mind, and I have lived in Korea and spent a lot of time in Japan) they pull off fairly well. They also incorporate local Australian ingredients.
LL readers might find it interesting that they play (or used to, anyway) introductory Japanese language audio tapes in the bathrooms. I think you get an いってらっしゃい when you walk in, but I'm pretty sure it's learned by rote and and I wouldn't try ordering in Japanese.
Michael Cowell said,
July 4, 2017 @ 10:14 am
Argh first post and of course it'd riddled with grammar errors. And I obviously meant いらっしゃいませ.
Michael Cowell said,
July 4, 2017 @ 10:37 am
OK. I give up completely on attempting to appear literate now. So here's a picture from inside, instead, where BBQ is written in 한글:
https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=0Bxv7EU0El2ygRk5RMno0WmwxMTQ
Victor Mair said,
July 5, 2017 @ 5:12 am
I asked several colleagues whether they agreed with what Matt said in his comment above. Here's one response:
=====
No. Of course, I am not a phonologist, but I am pretty sure that in modern (20th-21st century) Japanese he is wrong.
While in standard Japanese (i.e. the Yamanote topolect of upper-class Tokyo) “g” sounds are often pronounced as (non-final) velar nasals, the reverse is not true. The syllabic “n” is an uvular nasal, never (to the best of my knowledge) pronounced as a velar nasal. Some English speakers may HEAR it as velar, but standard Japanese does not present it as such.
Note the difference between ピンポン (sound of a doorbell, pin-pon) and ピングポング (table tennis or ping-pong, better known in Japanese as takkyū 卓球). An equally evocative pair is 金婚 (Golden Wedding [Anniversary], kinkon) and, as mentioned in the o.p., キングコング (King Kong, pronounced kingu-kongu, though the “u” here may be nearly silent in some regional accents). I am fairly familiar with the latter, as he appears alongside Godzilla in one of the films I teach to my classes; in the films the giant ape is often referred to simply as コング, just as he is the the latest American film to feature him Kong: Skull Island. Perhaps the Japanese film appearances lead some Australians to think he is somehow as Japanese as his opponent (though both come originally from the southern Pacific in the films).
One final example we might want to contemplate, however, is the Japanese pronunciation of Hong Kong, the former British colony near Guangzhou. In standard Japanese it is rendered ホンコン (though often written 香港) and pronounced with uvular nasals (honkon), never as ホングコング hongu-kongu).
=====
krogerfoot said,
July 5, 2017 @ 9:41 am
"The syllabic 'n' is an uvular nasal, never (to the best of my knowledge) pronounced as a velar nasal. Some English speakers may HEAR it as velar, but standard Japanese does not present it as such."
Why does this make Matt wrong? I read him as saying that Japanese コン might be reasonably rendered as "Kong" by non-Japanese speakers. His comment doesn't address how Japanese speakers would pronounce "Kong" or English words like "ping-pong," but in addition to Hong Kong, there are many words ending in -ng in English that are rendered as a final syllabic -n in Japanese: 麻雀（マージャン）mah-jong, プリン pudding, ヤン Yang (surname), メコン川 Mekong River, バンコク Bangkok.
Jichang Lulu said,
July 5, 2017 @ 2:04 pm
I'm not sure there's a disagreement here. The name 'Kong' doesn't look Japanese, because -ng isn't a legal ending in the usual Romanisations. Indeed, to try and reverse-engineer the Japanese for it you need to decide whether to interpret -ng as a nasal coda (usually transcribed as -n), or as nasal + gu (transcribed -ngu). Of course there's no rule that a Japanese-y place has to be named in standard Japanese in standard Romanisation, but many people familiar with Romanised East Asian words would probably find 'Kong' more Chinese than Japanese-looking. That's how I read the OP.
I'm not aware of Japanese having a "syllabic nasal". To find a "syllabic nasal", presumably uvular, you'd have to look at transcriptions of foreign words, like ン for the surname Ng. Japanese has a moraic nasal, one of whose realisations (covering the relevant case here) is uvular. Another one (before velar) is velar. In kon, that n is uvular. In Kingu Kongu you'd have two nasal velars (indeed two geminated nasal velars if you pronounce the g's as nasals). In Hon Kon you'd have a velar and a uvular.
Chris C. said,
July 5, 2017 @ 6:30 pm
I noticed this on my first visit to Japan this past May. Mostly on the train, since I although I have no Japanese to speak of I did know what stops to expect. Staying in Ryougoku, I was surprised to hear the "G" pronounced that way in the Japanese-language announcements, particularly since they pronounced it as a velar stop in the English-language announcements.
David said,
July 6, 2017 @ 4:47 am
use of Japanese language in this case merely a marketing ploy… many Japanese folk go to Australia, the closest English speaking nation on this side of the International Date line… Don't know though how many Japanese people patronize this particular BBQ.
Frank L said,
July 6, 2017 @ 7:30 am
@jichang lulu
"I'm not aware of Japanese having a "syllabic nasal". To find a "syllabic nasal", presumably uvular, you'd have to look at transcriptions of foreign words, like ン for the surname Ng."
Of course Japanese has a syllabic nasal. It appears frequently as a deliberately ambiguous response, particularly but not exclusively in male speech, to questions. It is also represented–and pronounced if you listen carefully enough–in the examples you presented of foreign word transcriptions. In Chnese or English, "Hong Kong" is two syllables, but its Japanese transcription ホンコン is actually pronounced — at least by native speakers — as four syllables.
Jichang Lulu said,
July 6, 2017 @ 4:55 pm
@Frank L
I think you mean "moraic nasal" and "four morae".
flow said,
July 6, 2017 @ 5:47 pm
@Frank L—to me ホンコン is two syllables with for moras, not four syllables. The same goes for (C)VV structures (at least those without intervening boundaries); to me, those are single syllables with two moras. I think the historical developments of J. [ei] > [e:], [au] > [ou] > [o:] are indications that morphemes like, say, らい, かい, こい should likewise be considered monosyllabic.
OTOH there is a frequently heard ン indicating 'yes' or 'I'm listening', 'isn't it?'. However, these utterances are in my experience normally rather isolated from the rest of more 'phrasal' speech, there is no 'ordinary lexical word proper' that is pronounced ン, and ン should probably be classified as an interjection—a class of words (some people wouldn't even call them words) that have been known to take on phonological shapes that set them apart from 'ordinary words' (Chinese [aijo], English [hm] and so on).
Lastly, saying that a given sound is moraic (as in, 'Japanese has a moraic nasal that is commonly written ン') doesn't preclude it from appearing as a syllable, since all other moras of Japanese may do so. It's actually characteristic of Japanese phonology that all syllables are composed from moras that may appear as independent syllables as well, with the caveat that geminated consonants 'weld together', as it were, two adjacent moras / syllables (the first of which loses its independence), and that ン has a limited distribution in 'ordinary words' (appearing only in syllable-final position, and the interjection ン where it appears by itself).
Matt said,
July 7, 2017 @ 9:25 am
Yeah, I don't think I'm in disagreement with Victor's colleague at all. My argument wasn't "the spelling <ng> is good because it's a velar nasal just like <ng> represents in English," it was "the spelling <ng> isn't so bad—it has been used by English speakers before to represent the uvular nasal in Japanese, e.g. this example from 1872." I suppose I could have been clearer.
Incidentally, this is just wrong:
The doorbell sound and the game are in fact both spelled ピンポン. (And the video game Pong is ポン!)
"King Kong" is indeed キング・コング, but this is more about katakana tradition (and the English spelling) than actual pronunciation.