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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
So in today's edition of problems: reading a book with a character named Mami is deeply disconcerting, because my screen reader pronounces it "mommy". I just thought...the character was weirdly being called mom by everyone until I finally stopped to check the spelling. Screen readers of the time are also why I thought "anime" rimed with "time" until I was like 14. Uselessly, looking it up online gives me four different examples of how to pronounce Mami, all with different emphasis and "a" sounds. Including one joker who really is pronouncing it exactly like "mommy". So I dunno.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
I'm gonna go with "may-me". Just so I don't have to hear about someone flirting with "mommy". I have no evidence that it's the most correct of my four options, but it's the one I like best. So meh.
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Jason Molenda @jasonmolenda@mastodon.social
6mo
@fastfinge (american english speaker with many years of japanese learning) yes the correct pronunciation would be indistinguishable from how I pronounce "mommy" in english. Nothing wrong with changing it to "may-me" to avoid confusion, obviously, but fwiw.
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MostlyBlindGamer @MostlyBlindGamer@dragonscave.space
6mo
@jasonmolenda @fastfinge here the distinction, for me, isn’t so much the A sound, but the prosody. English naturally stresses the second to last syllable, as in “mommy,” but Japanese tends towards short syllables, right? So you’d have to pronounce “mommy” in English in almost a staccato to make it sound the same.

Of course then we’re getting into different accents, so that’s a whole other can of beans.
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Jason Molenda @jasonmolenda@mastodon.social
6mo
@MostlyBlindGamer @fastfinge The funny thing is that I have far more confidence about how to pronounce "mami" correctly in Japanese than confidence how I pronounce "mommy", lol. I grew up in the upper midwest of the US, I'm middle aged, and I genuinely can't hear a difference between them when I say them aloud. But just now, I've said "mommy" so many times to myself, that I'm afraid I may have lost the thread on how I would say it naturally. :)
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Jason Molenda @jasonmolenda@mastodon.social
6mo
@MostlyBlindGamer @fastfinge Japanese is very consistent in is pronunciation of vowels; regional dialects are determined by pitch accent or word choice, that's why I'm so confident there. We see many variations in english pronunciation of all the letters depending on region/class/age. e.g. I believe some people in England pronounce "mommy" the way I would say "mummy".
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MostlyBlindGamer @MostlyBlindGamer@dragonscave.space
6mo
@jasonmolenda @fastfinge bags hahaha, yes, that’s exactly what I was thinking! Some dialects in England take the caught/cot variation all the way to cat.
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Florian @zersiax@cupoftea.social
6mo
@MostlyBlindGamer @jasonmolenda @fastfinge japanese pitch accent would make it sound very slightly different from mommy, but honestly not by much, and doing that in the middle of an English sentence sounds kinda stilted. I do think the first syllable in mommy is generally a bit longer than that in Mami the way I would pronounce them but I guess if you say mommy fast that kinda goes out the window. I mean ...slöt sounds like the Dutch word for ditch when Eloquence says it, and sounds like a rather controversial English word in its proper Scandinavian pronunciation, while it really just means castle. Different languages reuse sounds, not much we can do about it :P
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