Recently I talked about the way the English word “tip” is pronounced “chip” in Japanese, part of an odd linguistic phenomenon that essentially says that the farther back a foreign loan word was imported into Japanese, the more “corrupted” it will sound. (The popular marble-in-a-bottle drink ramune is another example — it started out as “lemonade” back in the 1870s. I’d also bet money that the word donmai (from “don’t mind,” meaning “nevermind”) has been in use at leasat 50 years or more based on how strange it sounds today.) Part of the strangeness of speaking Japanese includes re-mapping certain English words in your own brain. For reasons similar to the odd pronunciation of “tip,” the English word “anti” usually becomes anchi when used in Japanese, and it really takes effort to get used to hearing about “anchi-aging” vitamins. Another odd word is “micro,” which is pronounced the way we use it in English half the time, and like “meecro” the other half, with no pattern.
“Honey I Shrunk the Kids” is “Micro Kids” in Japanese, pronounced “mee-cro.”
