Okay, so I have a half-rant, half-serious linguistic question that stemmed from the reaction to the (admittedly hilariously bad) Free! dub.
So, generally speaking, the question is this: why do we pronounce things as we think they’re written when we can hear the correct pronunciation?
Specifically, in this instance, it’s this: how the hell do you watch two entire seasons of Free! and still think that “Rin” rhymes with “in”?
For the uninitiated, there is no “ih” sound in Japanese. Now, I understand that pronouncing it correctly is kinda hard in casual English conversation, at least if you’ve never taken Japanese, so I don’t mind hearing people call him “Rihn”, but you go to the Free! tag, and if people aren’t complaining about the ridiculous and insulting insertion of “dude” and “man” after every sentence, they’re complaining that “Rin” is being said “Reen”. Which...uh...is how you say his name.
(Now, to be sure, this isn’t quite how you say it, because the R in Japanese sounds halfway between R and L and also the I is a very short sound; it’s closer to “ring” without the G than it is to “green” without the G, but whatever, the dub has it a lot closer than the fans.)
So I got to thinking, and I realized that this isn’t the first time I’ve noticed this, except usually, it’s with inflection. This gets a little tricky, because Japanese emphasis is tonal, not stress-based, but it comes to basically the same thing, which is that English speakers in general don’t put the inflection in the right place in Japanese words. For reasons unknown to me, I do--I’ve just always naturally inflected foreign words in this way, which was great in Japanese class and not so great when I call a non-Japanese character by an obviously and laughably wrong name. But I digress. Basically, in standard Japanese, if the word has two or three syllables, the emphasis is almost always on the first syllable, and most English-speakers want to put it on the second. So I recall watching the Naruto dub (not recommended, btw) way back before I knew anything about Japanese, and being very annoyed that they kept calling Hinata “hi-NA-ta” when her name is obviously “HI-na-ta” because you can hear how her name is said in the original omg why is this hard.
Except now, this is a legitimate question: why is this hard? Why do we do this? By the time I got to Free!, I had already taken a few semesters of Japanese, so when I read “Rin”, I immediately knew how to pronounce it, and I just happened to be lucky enough to naturally emphasize things right for this particular language, so it has been very easy for me to be all self-righteously “You’re obviously pronouncing that wrong, just listen to them.” But the thing is, I’m not sure I’m actually listening to them, or I wasn’t at first--I was just lucky. So yeah. Just throwing this out there--if anyone has a guess or an answer, let me know, because now I’m really curious as to how our pronunciation of a word written at the bottom of a screen can overrule something we hear over and over.
