• threelonmusketeersOPM
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    1 month ago

    I’m not sure why we suddenly decided Japanese was important, but I’m here for it. “Tr” isn’t super pronounceable in Japanese either. Would some form of “San” be used in place of three or tri?

    Edit: Google translated “three decimeters” as “surī deshi mētoru”, so perhaps not…

    • tiredofsametab
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      51 month ago

      I live in Japan so it’s on my mind. Tri would end up like ‘tori’ or ‘turi’ though a lot of speakers might reduce the o a bit in the former and the ‘u’ might devoice in the latter being closer to “t’ri”. “Triple” is a word that is used (mostly for baseball, I think) and some people do reduce the inserted vowel quite a lot.

      I wouldn’t use ‘san’ because it doesn’t make sense outside of Japan (and, I suppose, close enough for Sinitic languages and those with loans from it). I went with ‘tri’ since it’s already a root meaning three (from Greek I think? I never remember which are Greek vs Latin).

      • threelonmusketeersOPM
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        41 month ago

        I live in Japan so it’s on my mind

        Cool! Do you follow Japanese spaceflight at all? Looks like there’s an H-IIA launch out of Tanegashima scheduled for later this week.

        Tri would end up like ‘tori’ or ‘turi’

        Doesn’t that mean chicken or bird or something? I must admit most of my Japanese knowledge is food-related… (^_^)

        “Triple” is a word that is used (mostly for baseball, I think)

        Huh, interesting. How do people handle the “ple”? Is it expanded to “poru” or reduced to “pa”?

        • tiredofsametab
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          41 month ago

          Cool! Do you follow Japanese spaceflight at all?

          Not really. I tried interviewing as a dev on a satellite company’s site, but apparently they require that one be a citizen for various reasons. I did want to go see a launch when I first moved to Japan, but it worked out to be rather difficult and doubly so as I had no driving license at the time. I might have to look into it again as that would be pretty neat.

          Doesn’t that mean chicken or bird or something? I

          tori does mean bird, yes :)

          How do people handle the “ple”?

          プリーズ (pu ri (long vowel marker) zu). Final ‘u’ gets devoiced in most cases and, anecdotally, many who say the word a lot devoice the first one as well. So pureez with the quality of the u varying from non-existent to schwa to normal (kinda like oo in moon but shorter)