Oh Herro Prease
It’s a pretty silly joke — something that the other residents at Ontakesan dorm and I throw around at home, mildly offensive though it might be. “Herro Prease,” we greet each other in the hall. Obviously we don’t mean anything by it, but it’s actually an interesting linguistic phenomenon when you get right down to it. The r/l conundrum associated with Japanese and Chinese is legitimate, and I’ve had some experiences with it since I’ve been here.
Little background: There are 46 Japanese syllables, each consisting of either one of the 5 big vowel sounds (Ah, Ee, Ooh, Eh, Oh) on its own, or one of them with a consonant sound attached before it. (Also an “n” on its own, but that’s not so important.) I don’t know much about Chinese, but in Japanese, there is no “l” sound. Or there is no “r” sound, really it depends on who you ask. Generally in romaji (Japanese sounds written out with English letters) that consonant is represented with an “r” but some people insist that it’s an “l” attached to each of the 5 big vowel sounds. Usually it’s easy enough to understand the meaning, and the r/l switch doesn’t get in the way of communication, but then there are instances like the time I had in my Communication and Culture class recently.
The teacher is native Japanese, fluent in English but with a pretty heavy accent and a tendency to break into Japlish at random. She was explaining why the original name “Yoya” of a train station was changed to “Yotsuya” for reasons ONLY relating to how it sounded — there is no meaning of the tsu in the middle, it just makes it sound better. She compared the sound modification to an English construction.
“It’s like a lime.” She said.
She was met with confused stares from the class.
“You know,” she tried to get across to us, “a lime?” To emphasize the point, she wrote L-I-M-E on the board.
More confused stares.
“Like in poetry, they sound the same?”
“…Rhyme?” I threw out. Relieved looks of recognition abounded. We related how to spell it.
“Exactly,” she said, correcting the word on the board, ”lime.”
This teacher is also responsible for quotes like another from the same class in which she commented on men’s fasion in Tokyo, “We have different kinds of of fashion here in Tokyo. One of them is really gay.”
No one disagreed, but that’s another story I’ll probably go into later.
