The flexibility of orthography

So I was reading around on tvtropes.org recently and I read Spell My Name With An S, and I read Theme Naming, and I read Word Of God, and it all reminded me of the tangle that invariably comes up over the spelling of anime/manga names. Of course, any time we deal with a source from a different language the question of appropriate translation comes up, but names… names are special. Names get all the usual issues squared.

For one thing, there’s the basic issue of how one renders the sound of a language with a completely different writing system. In some ways, this is actually the easiest part; the only reason it’s complicated at all is that English has several standardized methods of romanizing any given Asian language to choose from. So some people write “Shaoran” and some write “Syaoran”, and if the two sides occasionally try to kill each other, well that’s fandom.

Things get more fun and exciting when the ‘Japanese’ name has, in fact, been taken from another language and there is a double transliteration to deal with. That adds the question of whether we should use a standardized English transcription of the original language (Xiao Lang) or a standardized transcription of the Japanese phonetic rendering (Shaoran).

Theoretically, an official romanization could resolve the question, but we run into complications there too. The original writer may or may not understand the rules of pronunciation and transcription for a) the original language or b) English if the two are different, and may or may not even be the source of the official information in question (aka Studio Minion Syndrome). This can leave us with romanizations like “Riza”, for a name pronounced ree-sah, which doesn’t make sense as an English spelling no matter how you slice it but almost everyone uses anyway just to stop the bickering. It’s just as bad when the official in question is an English speaker who doesn’t understand Japanese phonetic transcription of loanwords; that’s when we wind up with “Arukennymon” instead of “Arachnemon”.

Then, of course, there’s the problem that Japanese does not seem to have an official standardized system for kana-fication of other languages. The characters used to render Latinate or Germanic languages, especially, can vary, and the unwritten rules appear to be pretty constantly evolving. Complicating this basic problem, the same character often gets used for more than one sound. An extended terminal “ah” syllable may stand for an “er” or it may stand for an “a”. A terminal “su” may indicate an “s” or a “th”. If there is no official romanization or, better yet, if different official sources conflict, we’re left to guess and argue and act like there are spelling OTPs.

And that’s just for starters!

Because a number of anime/manga authors mess with the spelling of their characters’ names deliberately, usually in order to indicate that they are strange/futuristic/exotic. Consider the name Kira Yamato, about as Japanese a name as you can get, but spelled on the official website in katakana, the script used for foreign words. Consider K.T.’s penchant for putting extraneous double letters in the names of some characters, eg Nnoitra. Double letters in general seem to be a popular way to strange names, especially double L’s (Cagalli, Killua). And then, sometimes, the writer goes full bore and comes up with something like “Quwrof Wrlccywrlir” for a name pronounced “Kuroro Rushirufuru” (the historical betting leans toward the last name being an imported “Lucifer”).

That’s my personal line in the sand. If I look at it and say “it doesn’t make any sense”, even after thematic research, then I don’t care if it’s official, I’ll spell according to my own best guess. Milage varies on this, of course, and some fans hold by official spellings no matter how weird. All of which only goes to show, this is another debate that will never end. Ah, well, I suppose life would be boring if fans agreed on anything.