@Aohige_AP:
The first quote. Third line. I can't edit your own post!
Oh shit, the first post I quoted, you are right indeed . . .
Yeah, sorry about that. Man I feel lame right now. . .
Will pay more attention from now on!
@CCC:
What katakana gives us is a set of sounds. It's a purely phonetic alphabet with zero ambiguity about pronunciation in Japanese. Unfortunately, when katakana, with it's relatively limited sound library, is used to approximate foreign words/names, there is inevitably distortion, and reversing the process in order to get a romanized spelling can be a crapshoot if you have no context/reference.
Suleiman's katakana is スレイマン. That is, su・re・i・ma・n. The "man" part is pretty straighforward, but "surei"? At first glance, with or without recalling the Ottoman emperor, that doesn't appear to resemble any sort of reasonable spelling of anything in English. But it's definitely how the word "slay" would be katakanified, which is why Aohige went with that at first, and why I agreed.
For an even uglier example, last week's "Hajrudin" was damn near impossible to guess correctly. The katakana is ha・i・ru・dei・n. Again, a complete mystery at first glance. Hyrudeen? Hailden? Hyludin? All would be possibilities, given the extremely complex nature of the relationship between spelling and pronunciation in English. To arrive at the "correct" romanization (which nobody did. Oda just revealed it), you'd first have to figure out that he was referencing Hayreddin (aka Redbeard) and then make the leap that Oda wanted to spell it in Nordic fashion, giving us the "j" (and changing the e to a u and dropping a d?). Wacky stuff.
Yeah, I expected something like "sureiman" in the original japanese text. But, as you say, the possibilites from there completely depend on the author's intentions.
I guess it helps, though, that Oda usually uses real life name inspirations, and specially related to piracy? (Although "Suleiman" was a crazy random reference).
At least, eminently japanese names are free of this? Like, "Kinemon" or "Kanjurou" are fail-proof names?
I know it sounds like a stupid question, but I remember "Shiryu" being a japanese like name that made perfect sense (Ryu being dragon), and yet it was officialy spelt as "Shiliew", weird name if I ever saw one. . .
)
