Kaiju Names: Anglicizations and Explanations · 3:10am Apr 5th, 2016
Most of them are really rather obvious, but there are four in particular that really need more explanation than they often get.
Godzilla:
What a lot of fans know is that the Romanji spelling of ゴジラ (Goꜜdʑiɽa) is often "Gojira", comes from "kujira" and "gorira", and that it's commonly called "Godzilla" in almost every country outside of Japan. What a lot of fans don't know is that it doesn't have to be pronouched the way we'd normally pronounce "Gojira", and that "Godzilla" isn't a misanglicization that Americans imposed on everybody, but rather, an Anglicization that Toho staff themselves chose.
You see, first of all, in Japanese, the "l" sound is often considered interchangeable with the "r" sound, depending on things like accent and how much thought you're really putting into and such, and some sounds and writing characters comparable with "j" can sometimes be considered interchangeable with "z" or even "dz". I've heard ゴジラ variously pronounced as "Gojira", "Gozira", "Gojilla", "Gozilla", "Godzira", and "Godzilla". Why is that? You know how in English, there's not much distinction made between the rising long "o" and the falling long "o", even though a lot of other languages consider it important? It's very similar in Japan, except instead of vowels like in English, a language that defines syllables by use of consonants and defines good diction by pronouncing all of the consonants correctly, Japanese doesn't always make a lot of distinction between a lot of consonants, as it's a language that defines syllables by use of vowels and defines good diction by using all of the vowels correctly.
With that in mind, it's no wonder that people working for Toho romanized the name as "Godzilla" and not "Gojira". They tend to consider similar-sounding consonants interchangeable the way English-speakers consider similar-sounding vowels interchangeable. Really, it doesn't matter as much if you pronounce the consonants like "Godzilla" or "Gojira", what G-Fans really often get wrong are the vowels: The "o" and "a" are longer than a lot of G-fans pronounce it and the "i" should be pronounced like a long "e".
A good way to troll snobbier G-Fans who correct you and pronounce it "Gojira" while still pronouncing all of the vowels incorrectly, as they usually do, because they're thinking too much like English-speakers who split more hairs around the consonants but largely ignore the vowels, is to call him what could be spelled in English as "Godzilla", but say the vowels longer, and say that's how it should be pronounced. And the best part is, you're trolling with some truth!
Anguirus:
This name has quite the history. It basically is derived from "Ankylosaurus", which in katakana, is アンキロサウルス (Angiɽasu), and this got contracted to アンギラス, which, given its origins and the "ラ" (basically pronounced "la" or "ra") added perhaps more efficiently contract it in Katakana, is probably best Anglicized as "Ankylas". However, as explained above, Japanese language doesn't emphasize as much distinction between consonants as English does, and Japanese writing characters aren't like the English alphabet, used to generate individual sounds to make syllables, and instead, tend to make the syllables for you. What really threw the Romanization process off was the character "ギ" ("gi"), because Japanese has few or no writing characters to show the combination of the short "y" as a vowel in tendem with a hard "g" or a "k", since frankly, we tend use the "y" the way we use an "i", so they had to do with "ギ" That got the name got slightly misanglicized as "Angilas" by Toho for their international distribution of Godzilla Raids Again.
However, in the USA, the project went to a distributor who feared that a sequel wouldn't sell well. He didn't go with the pronunciation Toho provided, which was Angilas, or anything Toho provided, for that matter, but had their own dub address the creature as "Angurus" and renamed Godzilla "Gigantis". However, by the late 1960s, the Toho-approved dubs that were recorded in Hong Kong were now being distributed in the USA, rather than the USA make its own dubs, so the name "Angilas" came back for Destroy All Monsters, Godzilla vs. Gigan, and Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla. When G-Fan was first being published, they also called in Angilas. So what changed? During the 1990s, somebody was able to re-release Godzilla Raids Again. It was still, somehow, Gigantis the Fire Monster, it just had a different title card, re-popularizing the name "Angurus", and subsequent books and magazines began spelling it as "Anguirus".
Rodan:
His name's easy to explain. In Japan, it's ラドン, or Ɽadon, a contraction of プテラノドン, or Pteranodon, in the same way that アンギラス is basically a contraction of Ankylosaurus. By right, it should be Anglicized as "Radon", so how it got Anglicized to "Rodan" is beyond me. It might have been to distinguish the monster from the element radon, because you can't license the name of an element.
King Ghidorah.
The name's history a bit odd, but simple. Tomoyuki Tanaka himself created King Ghidorah because he was inspired by the Lernaean Hydra, and added a Japanese prefix, a hard "g" sound that when used before a compatible word, sometimes serves to imply greater stature. Then the "King" title was added to emphasize the creature's greatness further. So キングギドラ, or Kingu Gidoɽa, is probably best Anglicized as "King Ghydra." Because it's hard to figure out how to properly anglicize キングギドラ without context, translators working for Toho who probably didn't know the history of the creature's naming licensed the creature's name as "King Ghidorah" to distribute to international audiences. But in the USA in particular, this name wasn't used, and once again, it was renamed in the USA version as "Ghidrah", because they thought that the contraction made it sound more like "Hydra", so in this effort to rename him, they accidentally called the creature something closer to his namesake. Like with Anguirus, subsequent appearances were made with US-Japanese cooperation, or just used the dubs Toho staff made in Hong Kong, so the name "Ghidorah", and later "King Ghidorah", was used in subsequent appearances, but unlike Anguirus, it stayed that way.
So technically, Angiurus should be called Ankylas or Angilas since that's what Toho originally lincensed for the name, Rodan should be called Radon, King Ghidorah should be called King Ghydra or he can just be King Ghidorah since Toho licensed that name from the start as well, and you can call Godzilla, well, Godzilla, it's fine.
With this one fact you have blown my tiny little mind. I was so proud of my pronunciation too!
3849129
I'm not sure if you are sarcastic or not, but I can explain:
By this, I was referring to the fact that English-speakers don't care if your long "o"s rise and fall, just make it a long "o". A lot of other languages make such a distinction though. Another thing is how "a" sounds and "i" sounds can be approached. It varies a little with accent. Some Southerners pronounce the long "i" in a way that sounds a bit like "a" as in "father", and some people in land-locked western states pronounce "a" as in "dragon" like "a" as in "way", so it sounds like "draygon". But it's all considered good English, the consonants are almost always nailed every time. Mispronouncing consonants, like lisps and confusing "w" and "r" are considered speech impediments.
In Japan, it's really quite similar, except it's reversed: consonant pronunciation can vary somewhat with regional accent, and there are a few consonants, namely the widespread confusion between the retroflexive flap, or the "ɽ" sound, and the "l" sound, Japanese language just doesn't consider very important to distinguish, and their definition of speech impediment seems to be more heavily based around how vowels are pronounced than how consonants are pronounced.
The reason why this seems to be the case is because in European languages, syllables are basically built around consonants, so you can say your vowels slightly incorrectly, and people will still know what you meant and consider it good English, as long you pronounced your consonants correctly. In Japanese, it's a little more complicated than that, but a simple way to explain it is that not only are there few Japanese writing characters that end in consonant sounds, most end in vowels sounds, but Japanese apparently considers words to be somewhat more structured around the vowels than in consonants, meaning that these are more important to get right.
3849685
No sarcasm intended! I genuinely am fascinated by this reveal. It's something that simply never occurred to me as a speaker of a Germanic language.
It was once explained to me that English is very "punchy"; our words and syllables are very solid things and we enunciate them forcefully, like we're making verbal punches. Japanese, on the other hand, is supposedly something more mellifluous; less about hammering those syllables and more about the flow of sound. Because of this, when I try to pronounce Japanese words, I try to put myself out of the mindset of powerful, stressed words, and focus on the individual syllables and how they flow together.
But this idea of the relative importance of consonant and vowel sounds is a perspective I never considered, and so it does indeed blow my mind. ^^