Megumeru wrote:Close, but not quite true.
You're being too polite — it's not close at all.
Bin has a completely different vowel sound from a much closer one we're perfectly capable of saying
using only English sounds. This mistake arises from English speakers naïvely guessing-by-reading instead of finding out properly. Same reason people say
calzone as though it's a zone for guys named Cal, instead of
an Italian dish: they never heard anyone say it properly, only reading it and guessing (or aping others who read and guessed), unlike with, say,
pizza, which no one says as "pih-zuh", because they heard it said at least as semi-properly as "peet-suh" all along.
This is just evidence that there are not enough Japanese people named Rin coming over to swat people on the nose with a newspaper for saying their names wrong!
FelOnyx wrote:Megumeru wrote:
her name would only have two vowels (vowels?)
I think you're looking for "syllables"
Mora, actually. "Rin" has two morae but only one syllable.
brythain wrote:you can get a similar effect by just switching to Japanese, typing 'Rin Tezuka' on a keyboard as usual (English characters) and then hitting the speaker icon. Inflection is a bit odd though.
Hiragana seems to work pretty well. Anyway, this is not a matter of interlingual subtleties like rising tones that English doesn't encode for or the like. It's outright lazy wrongness. "Reen" and "Rihn" are not that close, any more than
nice and
noose are.