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Comment by kiyoto | Hacker News Reader

In Japanese, the sign itself is called "attomaaku" ("at mark") but it's pronounced as "atto" when dictated. So someone's email would be johnsmith-at-gmail-dot-com, and if you ask a Japanese person to pronounce the symbol, they would say "atto". However, if you show them the symbol and ask them _what it is_, they probably would say "attomaaku".

Semiotics is fascinating.

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"atto" is アット　for　アットマーク and you don't really pronounce the "to" so much in the end, unless you're really from the countryside or something. It's just that you need to have it to make the "t" sound coming from English.

Not sure what's so fascinating about that particular example in Japanese, there are much more interesting things in the language than this.

Thanks for teaching me how to pronounce Japanese words! I am not all that familiar with the language. My limited experience includes being born in this little clubbing district called Roppongi, growing up in this little city called Tokyo until I was fourteen, and having read somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 books in it. Even with such a limited knowledge of Japanese, I ostensibly have a monthly column in a nationally circulated magazine.

I didn't say this was a great example to showcase the nuance and intricacy of Japanese. All I said was how semiotics was interesting in general, my observation being an (admittedly boring) example of it.

Haha, alright, I did not know what was your background in Japanese. :)

It just seemed weird to mention Japanese for this particular case of @ since I don't think there is anything remarkable to it compared to how it's pronounced in other languages as mentioned in the original post.

What magazine do you write in ?

Sorry for sounding like an ass, but I thought I would provide my slightly different perspective, precisely because Japanese was not particularly remarkable pronunciation-wise (but still interesting semiotics-wise)

I contribute to one of the Nikkei publications.

Sorry if the question is stupid, but were you born of Foreign parents (at least one of them) or Japanese parents ? Your English seems to be very natural.

atto is about the closest their writing rules allow. It is all pairs like ka, ki, ko, ku, except for n. So all loan words have to be extended if they end illegally.

Actually it's interesting that you mention this. Technically, you can also make it atoma-ku, (like ato like in later, and ma-ku as in mark). I wonder if the dip-tone was intentional to make it sound more like foreign word.

when you think about it - not writing (orthographic) rules, speech (phonetic) rules surely?

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