Japanese vs. English Pronunciation in Vision of Escaflowne: "Merle/Merulu"
I've been rewatching
Vision of Escaflowne cause it's fantastic and I'd love to do an entry about it but in the first few episodes I came across an old thing I'd forgotten about that interests me on a language level. English and Japanese have different pronunciation norms. Duh. For instance the Japanese have that thing I'm not qualified to comment on where they add "u"s to the end of a lot of their consonants at the end of words and I don't really know why, but that's not what this is about. This is about a quirk in English pronunciation I just realized that I find cool.
Many names in the show are Western influenced (such as "Van" and "Allen") and "Merle" is pretty clearly so when you consider just how difficult it is for Japanese voice actors to pronounce her name without sounding like they're trying to swallow a particularly uncooperative squid. "Merulu" obviously is not what they're trying to say, but I think the transition from the "r" to the "l", at least at the end of a word, might be a bitch for anyone who isn't fluent in a language that does this.
Try it. Go "rrrrrrrrrrrrr" and then quickly go to "L". See if you notice that in-between you involuntarily exhale because the tip of your tongue moving to your top teeth naturally flexes your throat muscles just a bit. Now imagine if you were a native speaker of a language that didn't do this and see if "rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrulu" doesn't make a bit more sense. Kind of a next level pronunciation technique tbh.
There's no real reason to this post. I just thought of that and it was fun to me.