Her Majesty – “I would actually argue that having to stick to the Japanese phonetic system, made up primarily of consonant/vowel combinations, severely hampers the ability to import foreign words into Japanese using their original pronunciation” I didn’t say that they pronounced the words accurately, heh, just that they go straight to the source, just as English does with many words, such as rendezvous. And I think that more Japanese would be able to get closer to the real pronunciation of baumkuchen than Americans, would (I assume) like me would go for the ch-ch-ch-cheesey pronunciation of ch rather than the hard h.

Hmm. I guess you could say Japanese takes pronunciation “straight” from other languages besides English, but when you look at what trying to fit them into Japanese 仮名 does, it’s rather hard for speakers of those language to even understand that the Japanese word is from their language…for example “rauch” in German sounds nothing like ラオホ…the “r” is completely different as it is pronounced farther back in the throat in German, segueing into a pronunciation of “au” which is closer to the English “ow” (as in ouch) than the Japanese オ….to top it all off the “ch” has nothing to do with ホ – it’s more like a hissing noise coming out the back of the throat, as this guy explains very well on this Yahoo! Answers page (second comment):

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080512201213AAyy1fB

I would actually argue that having to stick to the Japanese phonetic system, made up primarily of consonant/vowel combinations, severely hampers the ability to import foreign words into Japanese using their original pronunciation – as you’ve undoubtedly noticed when trying to understand wacky, semi-intelligible 外来語 of English origin! I live on Okinawa, where it’s a free-for-all trying to twist Japanese kana to adequately express the sounds that exist in various dialects of the Okinawan language. Unfortunately, as Japanese is the official language of instruction in Okinawa these days, the only phonetic tool people feel confident trying to notate pronunciation with is the Japanese alphabet, resulting in extreme deformation of a lot of the characteristic sounds of Okinawan. I’ve heard a number of Okinawans express the thought that romaji would probably be a more accurate way to notate their language.

Not that it really matters in the long run though right – most languages are a result of annexing a bunch of words from other languages and pronouncing them badly. Look at English for example, the bastard child of French and a bunch of Germanic languages…without a steady influx of badly pronounced foreign words most languages start to atrophy and die rather than evolve.

And do share the rendezvous story at one point!