Kendamu wrote:It's a little bit more complicated than that with translating Japanese terms into English, but Mike still pretty well has it right in the idea that you lose the "vegetable" pun when you pronounce Saiyan any other way. I'd say that the pun is rather important considering that everyone under that label has a name based off a particular vegetable.
The part of that that doesn't resonate with me is that if the pun is so important (which I'm not saiyan it isn't) then why not just translate the name outright and call them Veggie People, Veggians, or something? It seems rather strange to steadfastly maintain a pun on the grounds that it
is a pun while losing the pun in the process anyway.
Gaffer Tape wrote:Kurillin-Sama wrote:lol, I can't help but laugh at people trying to make objective right/wrong statements about how to pronounce things.
But there are objective right/wrong answers in this case. Yes, words in real life do change, but this isn't real life. It's a mostly static work of fiction.
That's actually how many words came into common use in the first place. Shakespeare practically invented half of the dictionary through his work. For all the talk about "say-un" being factually incorrect, we could just as easily say the same about half of what we speak by virtue of Shakespeare's made up words alone.
"Indoctrination" seems to be presented as a negative in this case but, really, that's quite literally how language works, made up words from fiction or otherwise. Might makes right. And since "say-an" has been absorbed into American pop culture, it is essentially now the American English word by sheer force. For all the talk about "sigh-an" being "correct" well...it lost...which makes it less correct (or at least an alternate, less common pronunciation ala the different ways to say "niche"). If we were having this conversation back in 1997 before the series saw it's massive boom in America the playing field would look very different. But it's not 1997 anymore.
Apparently, Daffy Duck made prevalent the now common pronunciation of "despicable." Originally it was pronounced "DES-pic-able" but because of Daffy's speech impediment he would say "des-PIC-able." (
http://tinyurl.com/cgec7yg) And since little kids watching weren't already familiar with the somewhat advanced vocabulary...
And I didn't even know this but it looks like the exact same thing happened with "grimace" because of McDonald's commercials of all things.
And anyway, the thing with language is that it is one of those things where so long as people understand you then you're doing it right and if people don't understand you then you're doing it wrong. So that's why if a word becomes "the norm" it then becomes correct by that principle. The people you're talking to need to be able to know what it is you're talking about so adhering to "common use" (even if the origins of which are dubious) means that the "indoctrination" is perfectly normal behavior.
VegettoEX wrote:DBZ's not some historical piece of literature so pervasive that it's beyond repair.
I really do think it is (at least this specific piece of pop culture terminology is), which is why going into it with the idea of "repair" would be like trying to move a brick wall and even the idea of "repair" is effectively ignoring how language becomes language. We could go out and scream to high heaven "DES-pic-able, you uneducated fools! Daffy Duck is
not an authority!" But...yeah... And that would be moot anyway since "des-PIC-able" is not "wrong" anymore. By that same extension, neither is "say-an." If Warner Bros. and McDonald's can be the source of "correct" English pronunciations by virtue of common use then so can FUNimation.
Communication today has made what used to happen over 100 years take place within 10. "D'oh" is in the dictionary. Pop culture is waaaaay stronger than you're giving it credit for. I doubt FUNi redubbing the show with "sigh-an" would change anything other than creating a broken base resulting in
two "correct" pronunciations, which is incidentally also what happens when language has the equivalent of a broken base.
This of course doesn't mean that sigh-an (or DES-pic-able) is suddenly "incorrect." It just means say-an
is "correct." Either alone or in addition to sigh-an.