• jutty
    link
    62 days ago

    I think you really miss the point. It’s as if your suggestion that romanization methods have imperfections dismisses the actual reasons why people will refuse to make the effort to learn how to pronounce a name from a language other than their own, which go far beyond whether or not the spelling “makes sense”.

    The comic gives a very concrete example of that. It wouldn’t matter if the letters exactly mapped to a perfect pronunciation, the mere fact it does not roll of the tongue, i.e. “sounds foreign”, coupled with the underlying xenophobia+racism combo is what’s at work there.