dgray_man | Somebody's name.

Well. I should have seen this coming a mile away. With a new D.Gray-man character comes new bizarre spellings and pronunciations. I can't help but wonder how or why some of these spellings have come about, however.

Sheiriru.

I see that the spelling for the new Noah's name has caught on for "Sherril" and secondly, "Sheryl." It kind of confuses me; when they first spoke of him over at MH they were talking about him as "Cyril" and thus it stuck with me as that, but all of these bizarre name variations started coming up, and the other ones don't really make sense to me...

Out of curiosity, why do you use these? Just because the translator is calling him that?

I thought about it and decided "Sheryl" reminds me of an old lady. And "Sherril" isn't even a name to my knowledge (but given the way Hoshino names people in DGM, I guess that doesn't actually matter...). What really made "Cyril" stick out for me is... well, it's an actual name. It means "lord" in Greek, but more importantly it was a really popular late 19th century name. It also kind of hurts my brain to type the other ones.

Besides all that, where do you think Hoshino got this name? Is this another case of her using the brands of silver accessories? XD

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I actually pronounce it ser-ill, so it sounds about the same as Sherill except no "sh" sound. So, I still think it would actually be the same. Japanese doesn't have a just plain "s" sound, right?

Not exactly. Japanese has "sa", "shi", "su", "se", and "so" sounds. But no "si" sound. "Seril" would be written as セリル rather than シェリル, which seems to indicate that they meant the "sh" sound (シ shi and ェ e make "sheh") to be there.

I think it could go either way, really. For example, (using Angel Sanctuary as my example, as it has many different spellings as well) the katakana for Rosiel (or Rociel, though I much prefer Rosiel, honestly) is 'Ro-shi-e-ru', and the katakana for Raziel is 'Ra-ji-e-ru' (if memory serves me. I'm in Toronto and my manga is back in St. John's. ^^;; lol) Both use the 'shi'/'ji' sound to represent 'si'/'zi'. I guess it's up to preference until Hoshino comes out with an official spelling. Hell, even with the official spellings I still use 'Theodore' if only because 'Theodore' makes far more sense than 'Tiedoll'. Not to mention both would have the same katakana, technically speaking. Same with Crowley. ^__^; Also the fact katakana implies a foreign name/word.

That's actually pretty standard romaji-to-katakana romanization. The sound 'si/see' normally becomes 'シ shi', and the sound 'zi/zee' normally becomes 'ジ ji' because neither actually has a direct equivalent in Japanese phonetics. I think you're assuming that "Rosiel" is pronounced 'Roh-zee-el"? Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding you, it's hard to talk about the logistics of this stuff without confusing everyone. But the katakana say that the name should be pronounced "Roh-see-el", which is where the "Rociel" transliteration comes from since it makes clear that the middle sound is 'see' rather than 'zee'. Anyway, to sum up, the two different sounds do represent different letter combinations in English and aren't necessarily interchangeable. In this case, 'シェ sheh' is a fairly foreign/unusual combination of characters that you wouldn't be using unless you were actually going for that particular sound, something like the 'she' in "shell". If they meant "Seer-il" the typical, logical spelling would be シリル shiriru, and if they meant "Seril" they could've written セリル seriru which has the exact "se" sound they would need. So I think the "sh" sound was intended here.

</tl;dr 8D;>

Hell, even with the official spellings I still use 'Theodore' if only because 'Theodore' makes far more sense

Yeah, there are a lot of crappy romanizations in this series that I refuse to use at all, but that's an entirely different LOL Japanese Rant. >.>;; *cough*

It is quite possible, though I still think Cyril suits better. As far as katakana making sense to anyone non-Japanese, sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. As I mentioned in my entry above there's the example of "galaxy", and then there's "Deutsche", which is "Doitsu", and the katakana for "sweater" is "se-ta-", and again, to an English ear it's a bit odd, as they could have made it 'sue-ta-' to get the pronunciation of the 'w' in there. (again, doing this without a dictionary. ^^;;) In any case, I guess however one prefers it, they'll use that spelling for the character name. ^_^

And yeah, there really are. lol. I'll stick with Cloud Nine, Theodore, Aleister Crowley and Rhode Camelot. I have to admit some of them are kinda cool though, like Lavi (which is much cooler than Rabi) and Lenalee. ♥

Yes, in this day and age "Deutsch" would probably be written "ドイッチュ" or "ドイッシュ", and "sweater" would certainly be "スエーター". But "Doitsu" and "seetaa" are idiosyncratic because they're very old loanwords adopted into Japanese before there was a standard pattern of transliteration. Current common practice is a lot more standardized and in most cases completely predictable. I'm not saying there's not room for interesting interpretation of character names (and quite honestly I don't even like the name Sherrill much); but in this particular case, because Hoshino went out of her way to include the little ェ e and create the foreign-to-Japanese sound シェ sheh instead of using the natively-Japanese セ se, I personally conclude that the "sh" sound was specifically intended. </blah blah>

Haha, personally I mostly use the pre-localization spellings for everybody. I've grown too attached to "Rabi" and "Linali" and it's always seemed a shame to me to obscure the reason behind all the rabbit jokes with "Lavi".

Somebody's name.

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