Milli mála - 01.01.2010, Síða 282

itself. The Council recommends that the guidelines should not be
too strictly imposed, especially with regard to proper names, which
may in fact be excluded from the guidelines altogether.3 The
transliteration of Icelandic place names and personal names into
Japanese has not been fully systematized as yet, and there are many
inconsistencies with respect to proper nouns in Japanese language
tourist guide books and web pages on Iceland.
One of the first requirements for Icelandic students learning
Japanese is to know how their names should be pronounced in the
target language. Icelandic speakers must be able to recognize their
own names; at the same time, the names must be made to fit into
the Japanese sound system. There are several possible ways to
transliterate names, and a consistent method for transcription is
clearly a desideratum. In the process of transliteration, several
decisions have to be made. For example, consonant clusters are not
allowed in Japanese, with the exception of geminate or syllabic
nasals; consequently, a vowel has to be inserted after every conso-
nant. normally this will be either [u]4 or [o], but there are excep-
tions. Hence, a choice has to be made as to which vowel to insert.
another example involves the transliteration of a sound that does
not exist in Japanese. a phonetically similar but quite distinct
Japanese phoneme will be used as a substitute. Here the question
would be which of the several possible options approximates the
original word most closely. Some words are forced to undergo so
many changes that the original word becomes hardly recognizable.
To some extent, the choice of which sound comes closest to the
original language is a subjective one and may differ among individ-
uals, although phonetic similarities can predict certain tendencies.
The choice depends to a large extent on the native language of the
person transcribing the sound: the underlying phonological differ-
ences of the two languages will help to determine which transliter-
ation pattern Icelandic and Japanese speakers will prefer. Japanese
is a mora-timed language, whereas Icelandic is syllable-timed.
Japanese has three types of special moraic sounds, i.e. moraic nasals,
TranSLITEraTIng ICELanDIC naMES InTO JaPanESE …
282
3 Ibid, pp. 57–81. (Detailed guidelines for loan words transcription and the discussion on
whether or not the transcription should always aim to be closest to the original sound.)
4 a broad phonetic transcription is used throughout the paper, e.g. using [u] instead of [ɯ], in
order to avoid obscuring the argument with irrelevant details.
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