Mitsuwhatzit
Last week I
looked
at mispronunciations and misspellings of the name
Mitsubishi, in particular
Mitsubushi (the winner in the
misspelling bee) and
Mitsibushi
and
Mitsibishi (the
runners-up), arguing that the problem presented by
Mitsubishi isn't in nativizing the
Japanese name, but in remembering and retrieving the name
correctly. Then came the mail (it's always like that here at
Language Log Plaza): about actual problems in nativizing words (mostly
from Japanese), about Japanese car names and their etymologies, about
factors that might have helped boost
Mitsubushi
to the top of the heap, and about still more manglings of
Mitsubishi. Here's the digest.
Problems in nativization (not
all of which I understand). Bill Poser, who has the cubicle just
down the row from mine at LLP, wrote to wonder why English speakers so
frequently mispronounce (and sometimes misspell)
harakiri (as
hari-kari) and
karaoke (as
karioki).
Part of this -- the [i] instead of [e] at the end of
karaoke -- is easy. Final
unaccented [e] is at best marginally acceptable in English, and is
normally "fixed" by raising it to [i]; this sometimes shows up in
spelling, in the variant
karaoki.
You see raising not just in
karaoke,
but also in, for instance,
karate,
in
Hare Krishna, and in some
borrowings from Italian, like the
salami
and
zucchini (Italian
salame and
zucchine) that M. I. Amorelli asked
about (from Sardinia) on ADS-L back in April.
The second vowel of
karaoke
-- which is sometimes spelled
karioki,
in line with its most common pronunciation in English -- is a bit
trickier. This unaccented vowel would be expected to come out as
a schwa, giving a sequence of vowels that isn't actually
unpronounceable in English (it occurs in
supraorbital) but is very
rare. So possibly that [i] is just a fix in the direction of a
better unaccented vowel before [o].
[Added later 5/13/06: Aaron Dinkin writes to remind me that (unaccented) schwa generally gets raised to [i] before a vowel, as in
Judaism and the three-syllable version of
Israel, so
karioki is just what you'd expect. Words like
supraorbital and (six-syllable versions of)
extraordinary don't show raising, because they're "level 2" morphological combinations (in Kiparsky's terms).]
Harakiri >
hari-kari is more puzzling to
me. Something like
para-teary
seems entirely pronounceable to me; it's just an absurd combination of
elements. As it happens,
NOAD2
gives a straightforward nativization of
harakiri as the first
pronunciation, but then admits that the rhyming pronunciation -- the
one I hear from everybody except pedants and people who actually know
something about Japanese -- is also possible.
AHD4 goes a step further, and gives
hari-kari as an alternative
SPELLING
for the word. The correct A A I I spelling outnumbers the rhyming
version A I A I about 5 to 1 in raw Google webhits, but we're still
talking lots of A I A I spellings.
Google also turns up some A I I I spellings (with the second vowel
anticipating the two I's -- and [i]'s -- that follow), about one-third
as frequent as the A I A I. But this version might have served as
an intermediate step from A A I I to A I A I: first anticipation, in A
I I I, then an improvement of this into the satisfying rhyming pattern
of A I A I.
I know, some of you are thinking that the baseball announcer Harry
Caray (1914-98), whose name was pronounced just like
hari-kari, must somehow be involved
here. But no, as a quick trip to
OED2 shows. The first
OED cites under
hara-kiri in fact have the spelling
hari-kari, and this is in
1856, 1859, and 1862, surely before Harry Caray's
PARENTS
were born. (By the way, H.C. was born Harry Christopher
Carabina.) We don't get "correct" spellings until 1871. In
1888, we get one of each of these spellings, plus the possibly
intermediate version
hari-kiri.
So whatever is going on here, it's been going on for a very long time.
Japanese car names.
Several correspondents have pointed out that
Mitsubishi is a meaningful compound
in Japanese:
mitsu 'three'
plus
hishi 'diamond' (in its
voiced variant
bishi).
The three diamonds are visible in
the company's logo.
This has damn-all to do with the pronunciation or spelling of the name,
but it's still entertaining. (Even cooler is Bill Poser's
observation that
karaoke is
also a compound:
kara
'empty', as in
karate,
literally 'empty hand', plus
oke,
which is, wonderfully, a borrowing of English
orchestra, somewhat
truncated. So
orchestra
traveled to Japan as
oke and
then came back inside
karaoke.)
One other Japanese car name,
Isuzu,
gives trouble for English speakers. Here the vowels are fine, but
the S Z sequence is problematic. As one correspondent pointed
out, you'll hear the reversed
Izusu
(even in some old Isuzu commercials!), and occasionally the assimilated
Izuzu. Here the trick is
to explain why
Isuzu is
troublesome but
Suzuki is
not. Probably something to do with the voicing of [s] (when
spelled with a single S) between an unaccented vowel and an accented
one, as in
presume.
Facilitating factors.
Back to
Mitsubishi.
Several correspondents have suggested things that might tip the scales
in favor of I U U I, over its closest competitors I I U I and I I I
I. The most common suggestion is that
bushido, literally 'warrior's way' (
bushi +
do:) and referring to the code of
the samurai, favors
bushi (U
I) in the second half of the name. Of course, both I U U I and I
I U I have
bushi, but I U U I
has the extra advantage of preserving the first half, I U, of the
original.
More important, I'm doubtful that the word
bushido is widely known among
English speakers, even though it did make it into both
AHD4 and
NOAD2. And even more doubtful
that many speakers appreciate that
bushi
is a significant piece of the word
bushido
-- though there are Bushido Blade video games, and people who play
these games are likely to know
bushi
meaning 'warrior'. In any case, I think that the most
bushi(
do) could have done is helped I U U
I a little bit.
One correspondent did suggest the word
sushi (which is probably the
Japanese word most widely known to speakers of English -- outside of
brand names, of course) as a factor facilitating I U U I. This
has some plausibility.
Finally, one ADS-L poster suggested that I I U I should be favored
because of the English proper name
Mitzi.
It is true that of
mitsi,
mitsu,
mutsi,
mutsu,
bishi,
bishu,
bushi, and
bushu, only the first is pronounced
like a generally recognizable English word (though
bushi is not too far from
bushy). There was a general
feeling on the ADS-L that
Mitzi
is now a name of too little currency to have much influence in
reshaping word forms.
More manglings. One
further correspondent reported that a pronunciation with two [š]'s --
Mishybishy, as he represented it --
"was quite prevalent in Charlottesville VA a decade ago" and that he'd
never heard that version anywhere else. Here we have an
anticipation, in the second syllable, of the [š] in the fourth
syllable. Plus the shift to the I I I I pattern.
It turns out that the spelling
Mishibishi
gets a modest number of relevant Google webhits, and they seem to come
from all over the place, including Australia.
Mishubishi, preserving the original
vowel pattern, gets even more.
No doubt there are more. Well, yes, there are a few occurrences
of
Misubisi. And
Michubichi. But it's time for
me to put the Mitsubishi file away. I can barely spell the word
myself any more.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at May 13, 2006 02:53 PM
