11 hours ago, BrotherBen said:

I find it irksome that they "fixed" Hoturi but not Toturi. Since tu is not a syllable in japanese.

If only the language weren't so clearly trying to be as Japanese as possible, this wouldn't be an issue. More and more, I find that I favor the idea of a Rokugani that uses sounds that emulate Japanese, without actually trying to directly imitate it. YMMV, of course.

16 hours ago, Yoritomo Reiu said:

You're misunderstanding a little. Kotei has four morae in Japanese, but it's still two syllables. The two vowel sounds are just held longer.

Western ears aren't accustomed to differentiating vowel length in any case, so even if you heard the correct Japanese pronunciation, it would likely still sound like ko-tay to you.

After 5 years of Japanese to meet foreign language requirements in my schooling, I still find it so hard to explain to people the pronunciation. Thank you for helping out. And yes, it will sound very much like "Ko-tay".

Late to the party, but regarding things like "kotay" vs "ko-teh-ee" -- it's not a distinction I think anybody needs to worry about too much, because if you pronounce the "teh-ee" part naturally (i.e. not over-emphasizing the shift between the two vowels), it's functionally the same thing; "tay" already has two vowel sounds in it. Ditto with samurai: ah+ee is basically identical to the English word "eye." To get things right, the key thing to remember isn't that you need to split the vowels apart or anything; you just need to not freak out and change them because there's another vowel alongside. Not every language goes off the phonemic rails like English does, with our tough and through and thorough. Any time you see "ou," it's functionally just the sound "oh."

(inb4 "but おう isn't always --" Yeah, yeah, finer points, I hear you. But we're talking basic pronunciation rules here.)

So you pronounce it like Chakotay?

On 2017/4/24 at 3:04 PM, BrotherBen said:

I find it irksome that they "fixed" Hoturi but not Toturi. Since tu is not a syllable in japanese.

Well, they didn't "fix" Hoturi as much as change the character's name to something that sounded similar.

Of course, you could always just say the tu like tsu , but then it's confusing because it most other places in the game usually tsu is written like tsu .