I've always wondered how they picked the original family names for the great clans in the first place. Like, if there was any specific inspiration, etc.

14 minutes ago, Suzume Tomonori said:

I've always wondered how they picked the original family names for the great clans in the first place. Like, if there was any specific inspiration, etc.

Well, 'Mirumoto' was chosen because it looks / sounds close to Miyamto, as in Mushashi. Makes sense; the original Mirumoto was basically just Musashi transplanted to a fantasy setting.

Most of the pronunciation mistakes I hear people make happen because they try to make it too complicated. You're something like 90% of the way there if, as someone else pointed out, you treat the vowels like they're Spanish:

a = ah

i = ee

u = oo

e = eh

o = oh

And it's always a hard G. The rest of it, like pronouncing "kyo" as a single thing rather than "kee-yoh" or avoiding the second-syllable stress English speakers are prone to*, is nice when I can get it, but mainly I just cringe when I hear "Kuni" pronounced "koon-aye" or whatever.

*In our campaign, it's canon that this is a hick accent endemic to the province two of our PCs come from, because those players routinely pronounce things that way.

9 hours ago, Kinzen said:

*In our campaign, it's canon that this is a hick accent endemic to the province two of our PCs come from, because those players routinely pronounce things that way.

Which clan/province (general area will do)? Thinking of borrowing this piece of flyff myself.

On 4/26/2017 at 8:19 PM, Robin Graves said:

I always wondered how they came up with that name. Anyone have an idea?

I have my own theory that it's an anagram of Lu Feng, an actor in many Shaw Brothers wuxia films. He usualy played the villain.

Pretty sure it's named after Liu Beng, aka the first Emperor Han of China. Known for renouncing his government position and leading a rebellion to overthrow the Qin Dynasty. Kinda fits into the idea of a fallen Kami rebelling against the empire established by his siblings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Gaozu_of_Han

14 hours ago, Kinzen said:

Most of the pronunciation mistakes I hear people make happen because they try to make it too complicated. You're something like 90% of the way there if, as someone else pointed out, you treat the vowels like they're Spanish:

a = ah

i = ee

u = oo

e = eh

o = oh

And it's always a hard G. The rest of it, like pronouncing "kyo" as a single thing rather than "kee-yoh" or avoiding the second-syllable stress English speakers are prone to*, is nice when I can get it, but mainly I just cringe when I hear "Kuni" pronounced "koon-aye" or whatever.

*In our campaign, it's canon that this is a hick accent endemic to the province two of our PCs come from, because those players routinely pronounce things that way.

As an Italian native speaker I find all of this very ...funny! I never got those problems!

Latin letters were designed to work like that, but it's the English pronuciation the problem!

And, if we had the fact that we are dealing with latinizations of Japanese-like names...it looks like Japanese pronuciation of vowels is nearer to Latin than English pronunciation is!

14 minutes ago, LucaCherstich said:

As an Italian native speaker I find all of this very ...funny! I never got those problems!

Latin letters were designed to work like that, but it's the English pronuciation the problem!

And, if we had the fact that we are dealing with latinizations of Japanese-like names...it looks like Japanese pronuciation of vowels is nearer to Latin than English pronunciation is!

That is because this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift took place before this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_the_English_Language

3 hours ago, Network57 said:

That is because this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift took place before this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_the_English_Language

This is probably why quite a few English hymns seem to have poor rhyming.

8 hours ago, Builder2 said:

Which clan/province (general area will do)? Thinking of borrowing this piece of flyff myself.

Borrow away, though the specifics are unlikely to be of use to you; we're running a Togashi Dynasty AU, so it's southern Owl Clan lands. The only part that might be relevant in the canonical setting is that the province in question is the Kitsune Mori. But there's no reason that "X is a hick pronunciation" couldn't be applied to any moderately rural region.

I think you say them however you'd like. When someone corrects your pronunciation you accept it with grace and choose to modify your pronunciation or not. The key function of language is understanding. When I say the words do you understand what I mean? Or do I think you understand what I am saying sufficiently?

I recently was taking Mandarin, which is a monosyllabic tonal language where you'd think pronunciation is very important... And it is, but it's still less important than understanding what someone is saying. Even the teacher didn't want us to care too much about pronunciation. When two Americans learning Chinese argue over the pronunciation of a word it's important to remember that Chinese people don't even agree on the pronunciation of words! If we're arguing about pronunciation here a dozen people there are probably arguing about it.

Along this topic though I'd kind of like to see FFG diversify the clans more than AEG did. The Unicorn should have more Mongolian style names. The Crab should be more Chinese. The Dragon/Tibetan maybe. The Phoenix/North Korea.

That's actually why I picked the name MoZi, pronounced Mo Tse XD. He was an ancient Chinese philosopher/engineer that only advocated for defensive aggression. Perfect name for a Kaiu perhaps.

My only point is that we should care less about pronunciation and more about interacting with our fellow L5R players with humility so that we can learn from each other. Nobody owns the truth. The truth is often more like the space between two or more people... That's enough rambling for now I suppose.

Yes, being able to understand one another is the most important part. But there's a difference between regional accents within a language (or between different related languages, as is often the case with Chinese), and just mangling the pronunciation entirely. "Say them however you like" is fine when it's an invented language in a novel, but when the story is using a real-world language as a stand-in, trying to get it right shows respect to the people for whom that is their language. And saying "eh, who cares so long as you understand me" places the burden of effort on your listener and increases the risk of misunderstanding.

I would prefer more Unicorn with chinese names rather than mongolian. Let the Moto keep most fo those.

I get a Korean feel out of a few Shinjo names: Hee-Young, Min-Hee, et cetera. Not enough to make a hard and fast rule about it, but if I ever win the Greatest Prize in Gaming and they don't force me to introduce my decidedly non-Asian mug to the setting, I'll be naming my character Shinjo Hye-Ri, after my favorite K-pop idol, Hyeri from Girl's Day.

1 hour ago, Kinzen said:

Yes, being able to understand one another is the most important part. But there's a difference between regional accents within a language (or between different related languages, as is often the case with Chinese), and just mangling the pronunciation entirely. "Say them however you like" is fine when it's an invented language in a novel, but when the story is using a real-world language as a stand-in, trying to get it right shows respect to the people for whom that is their language. And saying "eh, who cares so long as you understand me" places the burden of effort on your listener and increases the risk of misunderstanding.

What I mean by that is that we shouldn't be concerned with correcting people before they even make what we "deem" a mistake. When you sit down with someone to play the game though I think it's great that people talk about how to say the card and why they say it the way they do. Someone in my play group who knew some Japanese corrected me once about how to say Toranosuke and why they thought it should be pronounced a certain way. It was a fascinating and enlightening conversation between two people. It just doesn't feel the same online, on a forum, through a medium where people easily and often misinterpret one another. English writing has very subjective meanings often and can be interpreted a number of ways. People read books in English and then reread them years later to discover that they feel like they are completely different books. Spoken English is less subjective I think so I think it's better for discussing differences. Does that make sense?

2 hours ago, MoZi said:

I recently was taking Mandarin, which is a monosyllabic tonal language where you'd think pronunciation is very important... And it is, but it's still less important than understanding what someone is saying. Even the teacher didn't want us to care too much about pronunciation. When two Americans learning Chinese argue over the pronunciation of a word it's important to remember that Chinese people don't even agree on the pronunciation of words! If we're arguing about pronunciation here a dozen people there are probably arguing about it.

But I assume you didn't argue with your teacher over pronunciation as well. Your post seems to be arguing that correct pronunciation is completely subjective when in practice there are limits, a point where any native speaker would agree that something is being pronounced incorrectly. In the case of Japanese, that limit can be reached pretty quickly (regional differences in Japanese pronunciation are primarily found in pitch accent, something L5R fans shouldn't really worry about).

You're right that nobody should be a jerk to someone because they can't pronounce a Japanese word correctly, but no one has suggested otherwise.