Re: no smoRking?

Domomojo@xxxxxxxxx writes:

Jim Breen wrote:
I was at a concert in the 武道館 in Tokyo years ago where massed
little violinists played what the overhead display said was the
"French Fork Song".

If "smoking" was spelled "smolking" I could understand the similarity.

But there are far fewer cases where English "~ol~" is transcribed as a
katakana "long o", so they're not going to see that correlation.

Remember, to a NSoJ who doesn't know much about English (yet?),
language sounds are broken into the coarse chunks known as mora, and
they'll be looking for orthographic correspondences at that level.

As I asked Richard above do you know of any other examples where an
extra letter is thrown in with seemingly no cause?

Imitation, and over-generalisation. A Japanese will learn that "long
a" at the end of a katakana word is probably "er" in English; and a
"long o" in the middle of a word is probably "or"; and a few dozen
other "rules" based on an over-generalised idea of consistency in
English orthography.

The times when those "rules" give the correct results, we don't notice.

--
\ "Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to |
`\ recognize a mistake when you make it again." -- Franklin P. |
_o__) Jones |
Ben Finney
.