Apr 14, 2023
To:Swig
(Incoming LONG rant about Japanese words in the English language and my personal pet peeves, don’t read this if you don’t want to)
My first thought was, no, SHOULD I correct it? In Roscoe’s Vtuber name, (Oakley Yugen) he doesn’t use the specialized “ū” because it would be easier to search it with a normal “u.” I guess being a name it could just be ignored as a mere reference to the original word rather than the word itself? But the title *is* the word itself, presumably. I’ll level with you- I don’t like specialized characters like that. We literally already pronounce letters differently in English just depending on the word. I’m not gonna search up “Pokémon” until it autocorrects, what I’d type would be “pokemon.” I know how it’s said because I understand to some extent how “e’s” are pronounced in romanized Japanese. But not everyone knows that, especially not mass markets in the 90’s, so I’m sure that’s why they went that route with the “é” when they invented the title.
As for Yugen/Yūgen, you can find it being spelled both ways on the English web (as you could for most of these words) and I don’t see anyone screwing up the pronunciation. How are they gonna think it’s said, “Yuggen?” I guess I wouldn’t put it past some people. At the end of the day, it I’d argue it almost just comes down to aesthetics. Do I want the fancy character in the title? Honestly, maybe I do. Again, the practice annoys me but I can’t argue it wouldn’t look cool. I’d never use it for Roscoe’s name because that’d be an SEO nightmare for him, but if it makes more sense to people and more quickly gets across that why YES, I AM talking about the Japanese concept of naturalistic beauty and tranquility and you SHOULD read it like that, maybe I might as well do it, at the cost of the title looking that much more pretentious.
God I’m stubborn. I’ll still take the stance that it’s not a misspelling, cause I did at least know what I was doing when I wrote this like a year ago and I’m ornery like that- but yeah, I might change it. Thanks for the interesting rabbit hole, I’m gonna be showing this to other people to see what they think and then going on that.
