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[scriver]

If the A in anime isn't A as in apple, then what is it? And what other ways of pronouncing I is there? Do you say an-eye-mu instead of an-ee-mu?

For reference, I pronounce it as in animation but with an eh instead  of an ation.

[Max™]

Oh fuck I just figured out dude was talking about watching "an-ee-moos" rather than "an-ih-muss" which just seemed strange.

Those are both strange. The word is spelled phonetically, it's just "anime". And it's a non-count noun. The oni weird things I've heard are  changing the a to a ć (or a as in apple) or pronouncing the i weakly as in integer. That's a really common American / anglophone accent thing though.

I was reading it like the psychological concept, anima, animus, like animal with an "us", which popped into my head first due to Tool having an album named Ćnima.

[NullForceOmega]

"Anime" as in "animation" the e is pronounced as a hard "a" sound.

[scriver]

Oh fuck I just figured out dude was talking about watching "an-ee-moos" rather than "an-ih-muss" which just seemed strange.

Those are both strange. The word is spelled phonetically, it's just "anime". And it's a non-count noun. The oni weird things I've heard are  changing the a to a ć (or a as in apple) or pronouncing the i weakly as in integer. That's a really common American / anglophone accent thing though.

I was reading it like the psychological concept, anima, animus, like animal with an "us", which popped into my head first due to Tool having an album named Ćnima.

All of those are pronounced like in anime and animation, though.

"Anime" as in "animation" the e is pronounced as a hard "a" sound.

So it's actually anima?

[NullForceOmega]

More like "animay".  Just take "animate" and drop the t sound.

[scriver]

So animeye? That's not what I would've thought a "hard" a sound is, but I wouldn't claim any knowledge about vowal sound terminology even in my own language so I'm not going to argue

[Reelya]

So animeye?

It's certainly not like that. The Latin alphabet isn't nuanced enough to be phonetic so you have to show by example. The Japanese 'a' sound is close to the "a in car" vs the "a in cap". "me" is more like "meh" than "mee" or "meye". "i" is the simplest, it's like the "ii" in "key".

So "a like ah" but cut it short before the "h", same with "e like eh".

So to express it sort-of phonetically (don't vocalize the h's) you could write it ahnimeh.

[Cruxador]

If the A in anime isn't A as in apple, then what is it? And what other ways of pronouncing I is there? Do you say an-eye-mu instead of an-ee-mu?

For reference, I pronounce it as in animation but with an eh instead  of an ation.

They all use their normal sounds, so a as in taco, i as in asiago, and the e is pronounced as in Pokémon.

So animeye? That's not what I would've thought a "hard" a sound is, but I wouldn't claim any knowledge about vowal sound terminology even in my own language so I'm not going to argue

Nah, he's writing the last syllable as with the month of May.

The Latin alphabet isn't nuanced enough to be phonetic

Well, it sort of is. It's only when it's extrapolated beyond the language family that it arose from that there can be problems. English has a bunch of extra vowels but introduced neither the characters nor the diacritics nor even consistent spelling conventions to denote them. But the Latin alphabet works fine for languages that either are romantic to begin with or adapted the characters more comprehensively. It works fine for words of Japanese origin too, since by the phoneme list is pretty short and, by happenstance, pretty similar. But I guess people who don't know much about the alphabet outside of one language where it's poorly used aren't really familiar with the normal use of the letters.

[Paxiecrunchle]

Shoot I already posted that, nevermind.

[Reelya]

The Latin alphabet isn't nuanced enough to be phonetic

Well, it sort of is. It's only when it's extrapolated beyond the language family that it arose from that there can be problems. English has a bunch of extra vowels but introduced neither the characters nor the diacritics nor even consistent spelling conventions to denote them. But the Latin alphabet works fine for languages that either are romantic to begin with or adapted the characters more comprehensively. It works fine for words of Japanese origin too, since by the phoneme list is pretty short and, by happenstance, pretty similar. But I guess people who don't know much about the alphabet outside of one language where it's poorly used aren't really familiar with the normal use of the letters.

It isn't really. Think of the British "banana" vs an extremely American nasally "banana". Those are phonetically distinct. The same two dialects however don't apply this phonetic difference unformly. e.g. the way "car" is pronounced in Britain and America doesn't follow the same pattern. So which actual phoneme is represented by Latin "a" in British English vs American English is arbitrary convention. The alphabet doesn't convey that information by itself, so it's not a phonetic alphabet.

And no it doesn't "sort of" do it. Because a "phonetic alphabet" has a specific meaning in linguistics. Latin is not one. It's just an "alphabet". The whole point of the prefix "phonetic" is to make this distinction.

[scriver]

That only means the British phonetic Latin alphabet is different from the American English phonetic Latin alphabet

[Reelya]

No it doesn't, because "a in banana" in American is different to "a in car". "a" stands in for several linguistically distinct phonemes.

e.g. "fat", "fate", "fart" are all "a sounds", but they're all defined as different phonemes by linguistics. A phonetic alphabet is defined as one that has a unique symbol for each of those sounds.

The Latin Alphabet shares different sounds with one symbol, and the different pronounciations are either learned by rote or context-specific, so it is not classified as a "phonetic alphabet". It's just an "alphabet". The prefix "phonetic" is only to make this exact distinction. If we started called all alphabets "phonetic alphabets" then the term would just become redundant.

[Cruxador]

The Latin alphabet isn't nuanced enough to be phonetic

Well, it sort of is. It's only when it's extrapolated beyond the language family that it arose from that there can be problems. English has a bunch of extra vowels but introduced neither the characters nor the diacritics nor even consistent spelling conventions to denote them. But the Latin alphabet works fine for languages that either are romantic to begin with or adapted the characters more comprehensively. It works fine for words of Japanese origin too, since by the phoneme list is pretty short and, by happenstance, pretty similar. But I guess people who don't know much about the alphabet outside of one language where it's poorly used aren't really familiar with the normal use of the letters.

It isn't really. Think of the British "banana" vs an extremely American nasally "banana". Those are phonetically distinct. The same two dialects however don't apply this phonetic difference unformly. e.g. the way "car" is pronounced in Britain and America doesn't follow the same pattern. So which actual phoneme is represented by Latin "a" in British English vs American English is arbitrary convention. The alphabet doesn't convey that information by itself, so it's not a phonetic alphabet.

And no it doesn't "sort of" do it. Because a "phonetic alphabet" has a specific meaning in linguistics. Latin is not one. It's just an "alphabet". The whole point of the prefix "phonetic" is to make this distinction.

This is really a semantic argument, but what I was getting at is that it is a phonetic alphabet in origin, but not as it's used in English. Within the context of English, it is not used in a purely phonetic way and doesn't really qualify for the label, but in most romance languages (though very much not French) , in many other languages worldwide, and most relevantly, in Japanese when expressed through romaji, it is phonemic. Keep in mind that phonemes are also language - dependant, so /n/ and /ŋ/ are distinct in English but not, for example, Spanish. So the Latin alphabet works out to be plenty phonemic in languages that have a small enough vowel inventory (or introduce new characters). And if we're just talking about phonetics, there is no stricture that only one grapheme can be used per phoneme, so things like the th and dh of Gaelic languages count, or the double vowels of Finnish. Within this greater international context, there is a default meaning to the letters which is derived from Latin and with which their use I the IPA corresponds. That use isn't universal and English in particular tends to deviate despite not modifying the characters, but it's still the meaning of the letters if we're talking about it in a phonetic sense.

[Furtuka]

UNICORN

[Max™]

I love that it does the whole mode-shift thing, I hate that it doesn't stomp around punching other giant robots yet.

Also: buh as in but, naa as in knack, nah as in knock, buh-naa-nah, the last a is the same as in car for me, American English is by no means something you can just assume has a consistent pronunciation within a single state, much less as a whole.

I mean, shit, I'm a Texan with barely any drawl outside of certain words, head from the Dallas side of the Metroplex over to Fort Worth and it's "gawsh darn cowpoke town, ah reckon" so that's what, 10 miles between completely different dialects?

Then you head up to Massachusetts and hear someone saying they need to "barra tha cah to pick up some buttah" like 'the fuck you just say, think you're missing some r's there buddy' and it's best not to speak of the things they do to english down in Appalachia.


Here's a fun one: does "egg" start with the same sound for you as "age" or "edge"?