Novelist, technologist, photographer and resident of Japan, Michael Werneburg, discusses the frustrations of living with a foreign name in Japan. This guest post is an expansion of an article on his own website that details his struggles with living with a foreign name in an English-speaking country.
Katakana Blues
My surname is “Werneburg”, and the name just doesn’t work in Japanese. It originates in the forested heart of Germany where its pronunciation is obvious even if it is by no means an everyday name. But Germany’s rolling hills and rolling r’s are a long way from Japan, and it’s here that the import—like an invader species—causes some chaos.
The first problem for foreigners like me is that the Japanese language has a range of sounds that is more limited than in our European languages. Whereas English has some twenty vowels and twenty-four consonants, Japanese has only five vowel sounds and nineteen consonant sounds. Further restricting the pronunciation in Japanese is the use of a syllabary rather than an alphabet. These syllables combine a consonant and a vowel together, so that when you want to use a consonant you have to follow it with a vowel sound that fits one of the available syllables. The ‘n’ sound sometimes stands alone, but the rest must always incorporate a vowel.
scott j
C Ohara
Chris
Japan Australia
Jay Dee
emuu
lina
freedomwv
Fidel
Haikugirl
