Hacker News Reader

Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

"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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com