Thread by @ZiziFothSi

Oh my god

Jk Rowling made up a Japanese wizarding school

The name of which translates to “magic place”

But in a way that is grammatically incorrect

And she’s provided a pronunciation guide!

The pronunciation guide is wrong

Clear evidence that being a t*rf rots your brain

Okay language nerds, come with me on a journey more magical and well-researched than old jaykay terfpants could dream of*

*this is not a particularly high bar

RIGHT SO. The school is named “mahoutokoro”. “Mahou” means magic, and “Tokoro” means place. Easy right? Magic place!

WRONG

1. “mahou” (pronounced kinda like MAR-ho, rhymes with...ScarJo) is, in fact, a noun. In English, “magic” is both a noun and an adjective: “he performed magic (noun)”, vs “a magic wand (adj)”.

If you can replace it with “magical” and the sentence still makes sense? Adjective.

Here is how “mahou” is used in a sentence. It’s either put with the verb “kakeru”, which would translate in this situation as “to cast [magic]”, or it’s an object you can wish to have, or believe in. It doesn’t change the attributes of another noun.

(You can also pair “mahou” with the particle “de”, which is sort of “by the means of” - then you can put it with verbs such as “to change”, to mean that “[x] was changed by means of magic”!)

ANYWAY. Mahou translates more, in this regard, as “witchcraft”, so that’s what we’re going to use for the rest of this thread.

SO this school is now named “witchcraft place”. Which is...fine, I guess. If she meant a magicAL place, a location imbued with magic, there are a LOT of options to choose from - none of them sounding at all like mahou.

But hey, maybe jaykay meant to call it “witchcraft place”, sure, whatever. So she’s taken the word for “place”, “tokoro” (each ‘o’ sounds like the ‘o’ in “knock”) and shoved it up next to “witchcraft”. What’s the problem there?

OH CHILD

Okay right. This one’s a smidge more confusing but let’s do it.

Japanese is primarily written in two alphabets - kanji, which are pictographic (each character represents a concept), and hiragana, which are phonetic (each character represents a sound).

PAUSE TO ADD - it has been brought to my attention that not everyone prounounces the word “knock” the way I do, which is really quite inconvenient of you

anyway watch this to know how to pronounce “Tokoro”

RESUMING: here is a REALLY COMPRESSED SUMMARY of the history of Japanese alphabets:

Okay so way back when, like, 5th century, ancient Japanese didn’t have a standardized writing system, so they wound up using the Chinese kanji (pictographic).

Some Kanji were adapted, over time, for many reasons, into phonetic characters (hiragana). By c10th hiragana was in common use. In modern Japanese writing, nouns, the stems of verbs + adjectives are written in kanji. Verb&adj endings, plus prepositions etc, are in hiragana.

This is a WILDLY SIMPLISTIC summary, but I’m not about to spend all evening on this; the info’s out there if you want an enjoyable deep dive!

SO. When Japan adopted the Chinese writing system, they also imported how the Chinese people pronounced each character - but modified so it would fit the sounds available to Japanese speakers. Hence 四, meaning “four” is pronounced “shi” in Japanese, and “sì” in Mandarin.

However, for a lot of concepts, the Japanese had their own words already. So the kanji characters each ended up with one “onyomi”, the Chinese sound, and one or more “kunyomi”, the original Japanese word for the concept which the kanji represents.

“But Katie, that sounds really confusing!”

YES, YES IT DOES

A rule of thumb over when to use the onyomi (sound) over the kunyomi (meaning) is that if the word is a compound word - like airport (air + port) in English, you use the onyomi. If the kanji is by itself, you use the kunyomi.

Can you see where I’m going with this

So this kanji here - 所 - means “place”. When it’s by itself - as in, “this is a peaceful place”, it’s pronounced “tokoro” (ところ). However, most of the time when it’s attached to another kanji to make a compound word, it’s pronounced “sho” (しょ) or “jo” (じょ).

The more eagle-eyed of you here may be saying, ah, but Katie! In this compound word it is still pronounced “tokoro”, not “sho” or “jo”

BUT THAT IS WHERE YOU ARE WRONG

See, the Japanese language lures you in with its clean phonetics and regular verbs, only to hit you with concepts like “rendaku”, which is where certain consonants, if they’re not in the first syllable of a word, get shifted into a different but similar consonant

So even IF “tokoro” didn’t become “sho/jo” when stuck to “mahou”, it would still become “dokoro” instead of “tokoro”.

Which, FINALLY, brings us here. “Witchcraft place” would not be “mahoutokoro”, it would be “mahousho” or “mahoudokoro”. If she wanted it to be “place of witchcraft”, it would be “mahou no tokoro”.

Then she puts out the pronunciation guide as “Mah - hoot - o - koh - ro”

Like....no

The Japanese “ou” sound isn’t pronounced “oo”, as in “shoe” - it’s more of an elongated “oh” sound, like in “show”.

I’ve no clue where to put the emphasis or stress in the word, but I can tell you that the sounds are “ma” (‘a’ like in “black”) “hoh” (rhymes with “show”) “to-ko-ro” (three short ‘o’s, like in “told”).

My instinct (which could be SUPER off) regarding the emphasis, is to put the stress on the initial “MA” sound. But I’m pretty rusty so take that with a pinch of salt!

Tl;dr ol’ jaykay did about as much research as your average 13-year-old writing a self-insert naruto fanfiction despite having an unimaginable bounty of resources to hand

ONE MORE THING: don’t trust my pronunciation guides, I’m bad at translating the sounds in my head into any kind of physical form - also my Japanese is kind of rusty so I cant promise this is 100% error-free despite my efforts to ensure otherwise!

The GALL of other people to have rhotic accents that render my non-rhotic attempts at phonetics null and void ;_;

Okay what on earth, why can I never predict which tweets will blow up

1. Muting this for my sanity
2. I’m VERY BAD at transcribing sounds!! I’ve tried here but they’re probably off - for perfect accuracy please hit up a YouTube video or something, don’t let me teach you wrong!!!