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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muratori
[2] https://www.google.co.jp/search?q=muratori+%E6%9D%91%E9%B3%A...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Japanese does allow for word initial P in loan words, like Pokémon, so the sound isn’t impossible in Japanese. And pachinko is a Japanese word.
Fair; though I didn't say it's impossible, just unlikely :) Japanese words starting with "p" still exist, but they tend to be loanwords (pokemon = pocket + monster) or onomatopoeia (pachinko = pachin + ko). Thinking of it now, pokapoka is also a word, but again, an onomatopoeia.
> It was named after the Japanese onomatopoeic word pokkiri (ポッキリ), which is supposed to resemble the sound of the snack being cracked.
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That's a good point. Latin letters map to a big number of IPA sounds. I think this is specially true with consonants. Vowels, however, might be the same. For example, Spanish has five vowels (a, e, i, o, u in IPA). Japanese also has five IPA vowels and only the "u" is different in IPA
As a speaker of Scandinavian languages, literally none of the vowels in English map correctly to how we pronounce the same vowels. Several of the English vowels are diphthongs, which we spell out with double vowels. Like eng. "i" is our "ai", eng. "a" is our "ei" - "a bridge" is translated to "ei bro", where the articles are pronounced exactly the same. Or the Scottish word for home, "hame", is pronounced exactly lik…
There is a whole genre of puns in Swahili relating to Japanese names, some real some made up.
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Nit: pokatokaino is unlikely to be Japanese, since word-initial p has morphed into h during the centuries. But it works if you turn it into, say, t. Anyway, I think there's another factor: the common alphabet we transliterate these languages to is quite limited. I suspect the similarities become less obvious if you use something like the IPA, which has better universal correspondence between sounds and letters (i.e.…
There are other subtle rules that language may follow in word formation. For example, in Japanese, a word like tokatokaino may mutate into tokadokaino due to a phonological effect called Rendaku (it depends on details like if "tokadokaino" is a compound word made of "toka"+"toka"+"ino")
Yes interesting elephant in Japanese is almost the same word in Shona (a bantu language of Zimbabwe) nzou vs zou and sound very similar. Many words have similar structures. Many shona names could be mistaken to be Japanese.
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I don't know IPA, but Japanese e and Spanish e are also different. Spanish e is like English A in "ace", Japanese e is closer to English "eh".
That's the difference between [e] and [ɛ] in IPA (in IPA, with "narrow" phonetic transcription, you enclose the sounds in brackets). In American English, "ace" is [eɪs] and "mess" is [mɛs]. But I don't think that's right; I'm pretty sure both the Japanese e and Spanish e sound exactly the same. And if you pronounced [e] and [ɛ] to native speakers of either Spanish or Japanese, they most likely wouldn't be able to dif…
So, while I disagree that they sound "exactly the same", I do agree that in most cases the differences between [e] and [ɛ] wouldn't be enough to cause confusion between speakers of either language.
So do we know why? Apologies if I’ve missed this.
The article seems to say it's random chance, based upon one linguists opinion. Doesn't at all feel right statistically. Seems more likely there would be some kind of missing link. Could someone better informed possibly figure out the odds?
Why not? Many unrelated languages steer towards the open syllable rule. It's basically the only similarity between Japanese and African languages. Open syllables without complex consonant clusters are easier to pronounce.
Say, Proto-Slavic phonetics mostly allowed only open syllables, although its ancestor and descendants allow more complex clusters. For example, Proto-Indoeuropean domos "house" became Proto-Slavic domu, and mater "mother" became mati.
Let's list some Proto-Slavic words: noga "foot", ronka "hand", nosu "nose", oko "eye", podushiwa "foot sole", noguti "nail" etc.
You can cherrypick many languages like that (Finnish, Maori, Basque, even French to some extent)
It would be much more surprising if they found 2 unrelated languages and they both had same complex clusters a la Georgian (mtsvrtneli "trainer").