Needlessly annoyed

[tahnan]

I'm really annoyed at the commercials for DragonBall Z: Whatever It Is, which features various people yelling what seems to be a battle cry of one of the characters: Kamehameha. Pronounced "KAH-may KAH-may HA!" It makes me want to write a game with the battle cry "Akihito", pronounced "Achy-high-TOE". Jerks.

Comments

[foldedfish.livejournal.com]

"Carry-okey".

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes, we mispronounce foreign words--but, as I note below, they're usually not the names of sovereigns. And not deliberately.

[cazique.livejournal.com]

why is this annoying exactly?

[kirbyk.livejournal.com]

Because Kamehameha is a major historical figure of Hawaii, and they're pronouncing it wrong. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamehameha_I)

But it's true that we do import and butcher Japanese names constantly. I cringe every time I watch a game where the Yankees are playing, and they always refer to their outfielder as Matt-Suey. (It's Matsui, so properly the syllables are Ma-Tsu-i. A closer anglicization would be Massuey.) And you should hear Bostonites trying to pronounce Daisuke Matsuzaka. (They mostly just call him Dice-K, to the relief of anyone with any training in Japanese.) It really does seem to go both ways.

[cazique.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen the show - are they trying to pronounce it like the king's name? (I know who King Kamehameha is.) Can't it just be a cool-sounding battle cry that is spelled the same and pronounced differently? (You have to admit, their pronunciation is a better battle cry.)

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

They're probably not, no--I don't think the king has anything to do with the game. It just seems so disrespectful.

[(Anonymous)]

I gather it's sort of a pun--the 'ha' at the end means 'wave' (I guess the battle cry unleashes a wave of energy?), and the 'kame' at the beginning is in honor of Master Kame ('turtle'), who is this character's teacher.

I wonder whether we're pronouncing this name correctly in English?

--Norvin

[lapak.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure this is the answer. It's a thrown-together Japanese word along the lines of 'turtle school blast wave' that happens to have been transliterated in a form that makes it look like the name of a Hawaiian king.

I'm pretty sure that it's both coincidental and unintentional. Kind of like if the way to say 'shoot bullets at him!' in Arabic was pronounced cue-en vice-to-RE-a and was written as Queen Victoria in the English version.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Do you have a source for the latter fact? I'm always fascinated by interlanguage homophony, though it's typically more random than that. Compare the joke:

A Spaniard in London discovers that he forgot his dress socks, so he heads to a men's store. His English is quite weak, however, so he has to pantomime pulling on socks; the salesman, confused, brings him pants, then shoes, then Wellingtons. Finally, he brings a pair of socks, and the Spaniard says, "Yes, that's what it is!" and the haberdasher says, "Well, if you could spell it, why didn't you bloody well do so in the first place?"

There's an episode of Babylon 5 that hinges on this sort of thing--apologies if it's a spoiler, but: told to drop his weapon, a Minbari yells "Death first!"; later, it's claimed that "what [he] actually said was "Deh Fers 't" which, in our language, roughly translates as 'I yield to your authority.'" It's not a bad episode, but that has always struck me as a really, really lucky coincidence, that roughly the same sequence of sounds could have such perfectly opposing meanings in two languages.

"Shoot bullets at him!" and "Queen Victoria" aren't quite so related in meaning, but they're closer (in the context of the British fighting the Arabs) than "socks", so I'd love to verify that.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Huh. I feel genuinely better about it, then.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

The difference is that (a) Daisuke Matsuzaka and Matsui aren't the former leaders of a once-sovereign nation with their own holidays, and (b) we're not butchering their names, we're Anglicizing them. We're pronouncing foreign phonemes as best as we can, the same way that (to use the only example that comes to mind) "ice cream" is, in Japanese, "i-su-ku-ri-mu". Mis-stressing "Kamehameha" seems more egregious, more deliberate.

[(Anonymous)]

We do mis-stress plenty of Japanese names, though: lots of people incorrectly put penultimate stress on names like Hiroshima, for example, or Takahashi. But, as you say, those aren't the names of kings.

--Norvin

[iron-chef-bbq.livejournal.com]

I know exactly where the writers went to school! My sister's 4th grade science/social studies teacher taught her to pronounce the king's name that way. It was life lesson to learn to pronounce it one way at school and another way in public. On the other hand we've never forgotten the name.