Japanese speakers who learn English as a second language later than childhood often have difficulty in hearing and producing /l/ and /r/ accurately. The advertisement below for the book On The Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System is an example of the difficulty that native Japanese speakers have in perceiving the acoustic differences between English /r/ and /l/.
Hank Paulson, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, was at the absolute epicentre of the recent economic storm, and his account of how he dealt with the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression was quite appropriately translated into Engrish: “On The Blink”: an idiom for malfunctioning, out of order or broken. As opposed to “brink”: verge, the limit beyond which something happens or changes, the edge of a steep place.
The book title ‘On The Brink’ suggests that we were on the verge of disaster hanging on the edge of collapse whereas ‘On The Blink’ softens it somewhat to mean a slight malfunction that can be fixed like one of those vintage televisions where you just gave it a hit on it’s side to get it working again.
scott j
C Ohara
Chris
Japan Australia
Jay Dee
emuu
lina
freedomwv
Fidel
Haikugirl
