Anime
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Today's Dumbing of Age illustrates, in contemporary Indiana, a point that George Bernard Shaw made about England in 1916: "It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him."
Mouseover title: "super honestly, she just wants to punch everyone in the face"
Shaw was talking about the effects of geographic and class animosities, and Malaya's anime-animus towards Mary is apparently based on subtler sociophonetic issues. But the basic idea is the same.
Here's some online instruction in the Japanese pronunciation, which differs from Mary's version in the accent location and in the quality of the initial vowel (if 'aw' means [ɔ]) — though it's not clear that those are the features that bother Malaya:
This case adds to the issues discussed e.g. in "PyeongChang: how do you say that in English?" the fact that "anime" (like Pokemon) is a word borrowed from English into Japanese and then back into English.
cameron said,
February 21, 2018 @ 1:08 pm
The stress on the -MAY in the cartoon would seem to indicate that it's either the stress on the final syllable or the -Y at the end that she finds objectionable.
It certainly is a weird quirk of English not to allow naked vowels at the ends of words . . .
David Marjanović said,
February 21, 2018 @ 1:22 pm
I guess "ANIME", boldface in the original both times as far as I can tell, is meant to indicate a pronunciation as in the word me, i.e. a plausible spelling-pronunciation. "AW-NI-MAY" is probably meant as a correction… though I'm not sure.
I don't know how weird it really is: they merged and fell off a few hundred years ago, but they're kept in the spelling, so any new borrowings that come in with a spelling can't reintroduce such vowels.
But now that Lisa Simpson has introduced meh, all that may change!
Jason said,
February 21, 2018 @ 3:10 pm
@Cameron English does allow naked vowels at the end of a syllable. "Camera" ends with schwa, as does "to" in allegro speech, and many more.
Guy said,
February 21, 2018 @ 3:53 pm
My impression was that the author is cot-caught merged and the “aw” was intended to represent the PALM vowel as opposed to the “expected” TRAP vowel. I interpreted the bolded “MAY” as representing the stress being on the final syllable as opposed to the first.
Rube said,
February 21, 2018 @ 4:34 pm
@Guy: I read it exactly the same way as you. In my head, that gives you kind of a faux-plummy pronunciation, like saying "gar-BAHGE".
cameron said,
February 21, 2018 @ 4:48 pm
@Jason – You're right – I should have been more precise: doesn't allow naked non-reduced vowels . . .
@David Marjanović – I think you're right too. The -ME pronunciation is being corrected to the -MAY pronunciation.
Mark P said,
February 21, 2018 @ 5:19 pm
I read some time ago that spoken Japanese does not have the stress accent typical of English syllables. I have read a little more about how the "accented" syllable is spoken, but can't say I really understand exactly how it goes. I wonder, however, if that explains the different syllables I hear accented when I hear English speakers say "Hiroshima". Sometimes I hear people say Hi-ro'-shi-ma, and sometimes I hear something more like "Hi-ro-shi'-ma."
GH said,
February 21, 2018 @ 5:44 pm
Looking at the comments on the comics page (who presumably share the author's assumptions about how the word should be pronounced), the issue seems to be that the first character is pronouncing it "pretentiously" as something like /ɑnɪˈmeɪ/ (which seems closer to the Japanese pronunciation), while the second character thinks it should be /ˈænəmeɪ/.
Wikipedia agrees on the latter as the English pronunciation (to the point of insisting upon it repeatedly), but who knows what sort of edit wars lie buried behind that assertion?
Incidentally, anime's printed cousin, manga, might be a helpful reference for pronouncing Pyeongchang, as one of very few words in English that uses /ɑːŋ/ (though as you might expect, /æŋ/ is also used).
Tom Dawkes said,
February 22, 2018 @ 3:56 am
This seems a good time to suggest that EVERYONE should learn IPA and use it in cases like this! So-called "imitated pronunciation" is rarely unambiguous, especially with vowels.
rosie said,
February 22, 2018 @ 4:08 am
"It certainly is a weird quirk of English not to allow naked [unreduced] vowels at the ends of words . . ."
Except the vowels of "see", "spa", "awe" and "do", and, in non-rhotic accents, that of "her".
rosie said,
February 22, 2018 @ 4:16 am
'the author is cot-caught merged and the “aw” was intended to represent the PALM vowel'
That'd be a THOUGHT-PALM merger, so even if the author has the COT-CAUGHT merger, this inference works only if they also have a LOT-PALM merger.
David Marjanović said,
February 22, 2018 @ 4:46 am
One analysis declares all of modern Japanese a "restricted-tone language". Most dialects, including Tokyo/Standard, allow at most one high tone per word (including clitics); all other syllables have predictable pitches. Specifically, in Tokyo/Standard, the first syllable gets low pitch unless it has underlying high tone; all following syllables get high pitch up to and including the syllable with the high tone, if there is any; the syllables after the high tone get low pitch again. If there is no high tone in a word, and that's the case in most words, high pitch goes on the clitic if there is one.
Guy said,
February 22, 2018 @ 6:34 pm
@rosie
The author is American and so almost certainly has the same vowel for LOT and PALM. I think a cot-caught merger in North America usually means that PALM LOT CLOTH and THOUGHT all have the same vowel.
dainichi said,
February 22, 2018 @ 10:35 pm
@David Marjanović, Mark P
Incidentally, "Hiroshima" has no accent.
@rosie, cameron
It would be interesting to see how common the phenomenon of vowels that can't appear in open syllables is across languages. I wouldn't be surprised if open syllables were more prone to vowel reduction than closed ones, which could be one factor.
Rodger C said,
February 23, 2018 @ 8:00 am
The author is American and so almost certainly has the same vowel for LOT and PALM.
I certainly don't, but i'm a Southerner, not an American. :P
Mark P said,
February 23, 2018 @ 8:48 am
@dainichi – I suspected that and wondered if the varying accented syllable was a result of Americans trying to Americanize the pronunciation.
Andrew Usher said,
February 23, 2018 @ 11:44 am
dainichi:
I _think_ cameron was referring to spelling and not sound – of course we have words ending with unreduced vowels (the vowels ending 'city', 'follow', and 'menu' by the way should be considered reduced), we just don't like to spell them with a single vowel letter (a,e,i,o,u) at the end, but rather a digraph. Ad hoc phonetic spellings like this 'aw-ni-may' satisfy the same.
k_over_hbarc at yahoo.com
David Marjanović said,
February 23, 2018 @ 7:50 pm
…and also on all syllables of the word itself except the first.
philip said,
February 24, 2018 @ 1:39 am
Shaw was only partially correct: as an Irishman himself, he should have continued with this rider –
"It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him. He does not even have to open his mouth to have the same effect on all Irishmen."
[This is a joke, not hate=speech, whatever that is. SOme of my best friends are dead Englishmen.]
GH said,
February 24, 2018 @ 2:21 am
@Andrew Usher:
No, I'm fairly sure cameron was talking about speech. While rosie has provided some counterexamples for other vowels, AFAIK it's at least the case that no words in English end with a DRESS vowel on its own: it's always diphthongized into /eɪ/. Which is why we have "-may" in the eye-dialect spelling of anime here. (For just plain /e/ I would have expected something like "aw-ni-meh", though lacking the various mergers discussed in the comments, I'd personally prefer "ah-nee-meh".)
Saryan Sha said,
February 24, 2018 @ 6:06 am
These days, it's web comic culture to keep opening your mouths and keep talking so web comics can be made for everyone.
The English language has borrowed many words from many different languages. The pronunciation of each of these "borrowed words" is different. For example: pre-school is referred to as Kindergarten (originates from German language) in English the world over.
The word: Anime may be a short-form of thw word: Animation that the people-artists of Japan used to call their style of drawing / cartooning / animating. They like saying things fast and animation translates to a larger word in their Romanji-style language or Japanish (Japanese + English) so they use the word: Anime, with that pronunciation, instead.
They made a web comic about it, cool!…and that was the explanation.
Andrew Usher said,
February 24, 2018 @ 6:47 pm
GH:
If that's what cameron meant, he sure expressed it poorly. 'Naked vowel' is not a very sensible term, and the restriction against ending with lax vowels is common Germanic, not unique to English.
Meanwhile i am of course correct about spelling. 'Meh' is indeed another example of us avoiding spelling a final vowel with a single vowel letter!
Lastly /e/ is the FACE vowel; /ɛ/ is DRESS. Anything else is barbarism.