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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
seems to be common misusage in the US.
Correct Japanese pronounciation of hara kiri is hada keedee, not harey carey as i hear it usually called in the united states. It’s a Japanese term for ritual suicide (disembowelment—also called seppuku in japanese).
Can’t understand how such a horrendous mispronounciation has continued over the years here without correction.
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I don’t think this is really too rare – most people will read a foreign phrase phonetically in English, and I imagine this is something that most Westerners learnt about in print rather than in conversation. As Japanese is (in the West) a much less commonly spoken language then it will be less frequently corrected than a phrase from French, Spanish, German etc., or even Latin, which is taught extensively in more upper-crust educational institutes.
Although on second thoughts it is odd, as the proper anglicised pronounciation should be “harra kiree” – it’s as if someone’s made up their own Japanese pronounciation somewhere along the line.
I must confess I never knew the correct pronounciation of hari kiri. In fact, I suspect if I spoke of “hada keedee” the vast majority of people wouldn’t know what on Earth I was talking about.
Devil’s advocate, but could it be that the “harey carey” pronounciation be considered an official Anglicisation of hara kiri?
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The name of famous baseball announcer Harry Caray (of the Chicago Cubs) probably didn’t help matters, but made the mispronounced Japanese term even more familiar to the public’s ears. (There was an actor by the same name albeit with a different spelling.)
Feeling quite combobulated.
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Welcome to the Forum, editortwo.
editortwo wrote:
Can’t understand how such a horrendous mispronounciation has continued over the years here without correction.
Well, it’s hardly unique, is it? There are probably dozens of words borrowed from Japanese that make similar substitutions. Sake, shitake, karaoke etc. end in Japanese with a vowel that is somewhere between the vowel in the English words bet and may (IPA /e/). Yet in English, each rhymes with city, happy, etc. The spelling, combined with the frequency of that sound at the end of English words makes it almost inevitable.
[EDIT: No, it’s not a rhyme, since it doesn’t affect stressed syllables. What I mean to say is “ends with the same vowel as…”]
Then there’s the Korean car company, Hyundai, which is pronounced differently by English speakers in Canada and the USA – neither very close to the Korean.
Would it seem less horrendous if you knew how Japanese speakers pronounce English loan words like orchestra, McDonald’s or double play? Maybe not.
Of course, none of these are eggcorns – reshaped words or idioms phonetically similar to the original but with new, sensible semantics. Better definitions may be found in the Eggcornology section or the Database’s About page.
Last edited by nilep (2008-09-12 11:20:16)
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For me, it’s easier to understand why this persists than how it got started in the first place. English has a large inventory of rhyming reduplicative words—like “boogie woogie” and “willy nilly” and “mumbo jumbo.” The “harey carey” pronunciation slots pretty neatly into that pattern. In fact, we already have one such collocation that rhymes with (the American take on) “hara kiri”—“airy fairy.” Those two words provided the opening of Tennyson’s poem “Lilian” (1830), so the phrase may already have been around to serve as support whenever “hara kiri” was spreading in English.
Perhaps these sorts of phrases have a certain “gravitational pull” of their own. Maybe if a phrase gets a little too close to sounding like a rhyming reduplicative, the pattern can take over and impose a reshaping. That’s purely speculative, of course, but the fact the individual components of the original phrase mean nothing at all in isolation for most English speakers probably makes it easier for us to mangle them in accordance with our own linguistic expectations.
Last edited by patschwieterman (2008-09-12 20:49:24)
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There is also perhaps the factor that when hara kiri was introduced as a concept to most people in the West, the Japanese were our wartime enemies. It wasn’t a time to be culturally sensitive and for the west to check they weren’t offending anyone with mispronounciation. Also the pronounciation “harey carey” or “harry carry” gives the rather gruesome concept a rather ridiculous name (like “mumbo jumbo” or “willy nilly”) that could have aided in mocking the practice.
Last edited by PeteMella (2008-09-15 03:31:51)
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PeteMella wrote:
There is also perhaps the factor that when hara kiri was introduced as a concept to most people in the West, the Japanese were our wartime enemies.
If you’re referring to the Second World War, I think the word was well attested by that time. Note that hara kiri was a practice of samurai warriors. By the mid-twentieth century it was no longer practiced but was largely confined to history or literature.
As Pat notes, it seems entirely likely that airy-fairy exerted an influence. The first citation of the word in the OED is from Harper’s Magazine: “Hari Kari of Japan [sic]” March 1856. Tennyson’s words certainly might have been ringing in Harper’s editors’ ears at that time.
I should allow that not everyone read Harper’s, and WWII probably occasioned a sudden swell of interest in Japan. On the other hand, there are numerous appearances of both hari kiri and hara kiri in periodicals and books from 1856 onward. Google Books shows 318 unique hits for the former and another 281 of the latter between 1800-1942 (no doubt with considerable overlap).
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Interested stuff, Nilep, cheers. There was supposedly a glut of “hara kiri” incidents at the close of WWII, as Japanese soldiers refused to surrender to the Allies, and I was wondering if this was the time it entered the national conciousness (whether or not the stories were true or apocryphal) and with it the pronounciation “harry carry”.
Before that time the phrase “hara kiri” would have been read rather than heard, but if these reports filtered to radio reports this may have been the moment when the “harry carry” pronounciation may have been crystallised, especially at a time when no-one would be too fussed about correct Japanese pronounciation. This would have been particularly easy to do if journalists were misspelling it “hari kari” as you’ve quoted from Harper’s.
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The OED seems to support Nilep’s view that the reshaping of “hara kiri” took place well before WWII. The dictionary has 6 citations, all dated to between 1856 and 1888, and 4 of those use the “hari kari” spelling. (And one of the remaining 2 citations uses two different spellings of the word.) So whether or not people were pronouncing the word aloud much in the 19th C, many who were familiar with the term probably knew it only in the “hari kari” version—it appears to have been effectively “standard” at that time.
PeteMella’s comment on the nonsensical nature of the term in any form does work here. People who work on reduplicatives in English usually split them into three classes, and it’s the rhyming reduplicatives that are most typically “nonsense” words in English—this class seems particularly well prepared to absorb any foreign phrases that approximate the usual pattern.
I remember that some prominent members of the Imperial war cabinet committed seppuku right after the Japanese surrender, but I don’t know what effect that had on the pronunciation of the term—it might ultimately have helped to popularize the native form of the word in print if not in speech.
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