The other day I was watching a BBC documentary on ancient history, because BBC documentaries are awesome — I hope our readers in the UK know how much we appreciate them. I took note of the way the word “minotaur” was pronounced in the show: MINE-ah-tour, which differed from my California dialect of American English in which the word is pronounced MIN-ah-taur. The question of how to inflect/pronounce words like this wouldn’t be an issue in Japanese, thanks to the katakana writing system, which provides an absolute (if imperfect) way to pronounce anything. Japanese who go to America sometimes encounter a native English speaker who can’t pronounce names like Chopin or Hermes or Evangelion “correctly” (this word of course being subjective), and are amazed by this. On the other hand, Japanese can have an incredible amount of difficulty reading their own language, especially kanji for names, which can have many possible readings. As I was writing the description for an issue of Dengeki Hime, I encountered a name that used difficult kanji. Not only could I not read the name, but none of the Japanese staff at J-List could read it either, and it took several minutes of Googling for us to find the official pronunciation (it was Manaka Komaki from the game ToHeart).
Minotaur in Japanese is minotaurus, from the Latin. Shirow draws rather nicely, don’t you think?
