6 ms·

I remember reading a story about how he picked the name "Roland". He wanted a company name that would be pronounced and spelled the same way in any language and

I remember reading a story about how he picked the name "Roland". He wanted a company name that would be pronounced and spelled the same way in any language and country, and escape translation issues. The irony was not lost on him that the Japanese (his home country) have trouble pronouncing the 'R'.

microcolonel 10y ago
It's more the l than the r, the pronunciation is also otherwise completely different in Japanese, because they don't have consonant finals, only nasals. You end up with ro-rahn-doh.
- gozur88 10y ago
  That's what I was thinking. If he really wanted a name that would be the same in English and Japanese, he would have nixed the "d" at the end and called the company "Rolan".
- yongjik 10y ago
  I have to wonder if something like this exchange ever occurred: "I named it Roland because I wanted it to sound the same in other languages..." "But, but... English speakers read it as Roland. Japanese speakers read it as rorando." "Yes, exactly. Same thing."
rangibaby 10y ago
To Japanese L and R are the same sound and are interchangeable because they can't hear the difference. Another funny story is the Nikon's single lens reFlex camera, the F: it was called than instead of the Nikon R because of the L-R "problem".
- bryanlarsen 10y ago
  The Japanese I met didn't have any problems. They get enough exposure as kids to Western media and English in school.
  - Larrikin 10y ago
    You met a very small sample. The stereotype in the West is that Japanese can't do the L sound when it's actually specific versions of the R sound that give people not exposed to it early enough alot of issues
  - khedoros1 10y ago
    In college, I talked to a Japanese friend about it (I was studying Japanese at the time, so differences between the languages were a natural topic). He could tell the difference between "right" and "light" when I enunciated them clearly, one after the other to provide an immediate contrast between them, but couldn't otherwise. In most cases, context was enough to disambiguate the meaning. So, he can (of course) physiologically hear the difference, but he wasn't conditioned to listen for it. There are features like that for me in other languages (tones in Chinese, as one glaring example).
- Razengan 10y ago
  > they can't hear the difference. There are no humans that "can't" hear the difference between L and R. But there are languages that don't have both sounds. Just like English-speaking people usually being unable – or unwilling – to say the soft T sound in た、て、と but it's not like you can't hear the difference: [0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMYsdjeeC1Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMYsdjeeC1Y
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >There are no humans that "can't" hear the difference between L and R. You'd be surprised. There are no 100% objective sounds the ear directly hears -- interpretation and identification of sounds happens at the brain, and a person that was raised with a specific language/pronunciation can be "deaf" to the difference of certain sounds. Evidence from Best & Strange (1992) and Yamada & Tohkura (1992) suggest that Japanese speakers perceive English /r/ as somewhat like the compressed-lip velar approximant /w͍/ and other studies[4] have shown speakers to hear it more as an ill-formed /ɺ/. Goto (1971) reports that native speakers of Japanese who have learned English as adults have difficulty perceiving the acoustic differences between English /r/ and /l/, even if the speakers are comfortable with conversational English, have lived in an English-speaking country for extended periods, and can articulate the two sounds when speaking English. Japanese speakers can, however, perceive the difference between English /r/ and /l/ when these sounds are not mentally processed as speech sounds. Miyawaki et al. (1975) found that Japanese speakers could distinguish /r/ and /l/ just as well as native English speakers if the sounds were acoustically manipulated in a way that made them sound less like speech (by removal of all acoustic information except the F3 component). Lively et al. (1994) found that speakers' ability to distinguish between the two sounds depended on where the sound occurred. Word-final /l/ and /r/ with a preceding vowel were distinguished the best, followed by word-initial /r/ and /l/. Those that occurred in initial consonant clusters or between vowels were the most difficult to distinguish accurately. Bradlow et al. (1997) provide evidence that there is a link between perception and production to the extent that perceptual learning generally transferred to improved production. However, there may be little correlation between degrees of learning in perception and production after training in perception, due to the wide range of individual variation in learning strategies. The same can happen with colors (for them, depending on whether the language/culture has a name for them). So what you write is not 100% true. At best, it's debatable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception_of_English_/r/_and_/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception_of_English_/r/_and_... l/_by_Japanese_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_... https://eagereyes.org/blog/2011/you-only-see-colors-you-can-name https://eagereyes.org/blog/2011/you-only-see-colors-you-can-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction... https://www.businessinsider.com.au/what-is-blue-and-how-do-we-see-color-2015-2 https://www.businessinsider.com.au/what-is-blue-and-how-do-w...

microcolonel 10y ago

It's more the l than the r, the pronunciation is also otherwise completely different in Japanese, because they don't have consonant finals, only nasals. You end up with ro-rahn-doh.

gozur88 10y ago
That's what I was thinking. If he really wanted a name that would be the same in English and Japanese, he would have nixed the "d" at the end and called the company "Rolan".
yongjik 10y ago
I have to wonder if something like this exchange ever occurred: "I named it Roland because I wanted it to sound the same in other languages..." "But, but... English speakers read it as Roland. Japanese speakers read it as rorando." "Yes, exactly. Same thing."

rangibaby 10y ago

To Japanese L and R are the same sound and are interchangeable because they can't hear the difference. Another funny story is the Nikon's single lens reFlex camera, the F: it was called than instead of the Nikon R because of the L-R "problem".

bryanlarsen 10y ago
The Japanese I met didn't have any problems. They get enough exposure as kids to Western media and English in school.
- Larrikin 10y ago
  You met a very small sample. The stereotype in the West is that Japanese can't do the L sound when it's actually specific versions of the R sound that give people not exposed to it early enough alot of issues
- khedoros1 10y ago
  In college, I talked to a Japanese friend about it (I was studying Japanese at the time, so differences between the languages were a natural topic). He could tell the difference between "right" and "light" when I enunciated them clearly, one after the other to provide an immediate contrast between them, but couldn't otherwise. In most cases, context was enough to disambiguate the meaning. So, he can (of course) physiologically hear the difference, but he wasn't conditioned to listen for it. There are features like that for me in other languages (tones in Chinese, as one glaring example).
Razengan 10y ago
> they can't hear the difference. There are no humans that "can't" hear the difference between L and R. But there are languages that don't have both sounds. Just like English-speaking people usually being unable – or unwilling – to say the soft T sound in た、て、と but it's not like you can't hear the difference: [0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMYsdjeeC1Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMYsdjeeC1Y
- coldtea 10y ago
  >There are no humans that "can't" hear the difference between L and R. You'd be surprised. There are no 100% objective sounds the ear directly hears -- interpretation and identification of sounds happens at the brain, and a person that was raised with a specific language/pronunciation can be "deaf" to the difference of certain sounds. Evidence from Best & Strange (1992) and Yamada & Tohkura (1992) suggest that Japanese speakers perceive English /r/ as somewhat like the compressed-lip velar approximant /w͍/ and other studies[4] have shown speakers to hear it more as an ill-formed /ɺ/. Goto (1971) reports that native speakers of Japanese who have learned English as adults have difficulty perceiving the acoustic differences between English /r/ and /l/, even if the speakers are comfortable with conversational English, have lived in an English-speaking country for extended periods, and can articulate the two sounds when speaking English. Japanese speakers can, however, perceive the difference between English /r/ and /l/ when these sounds are not mentally processed as speech sounds. Miyawaki et al. (1975) found that Japanese speakers could distinguish /r/ and /l/ just as well as native English speakers if the sounds were acoustically manipulated in a way that made them sound less like speech (by removal of all acoustic information except the F3 component). Lively et al. (1994) found that speakers' ability to distinguish between the two sounds depended on where the sound occurred. Word-final /l/ and /r/ with a preceding vowel were distinguished the best, followed by word-initial /r/ and /l/. Those that occurred in initial consonant clusters or between vowels were the most difficult to distinguish accurately. Bradlow et al. (1997) provide evidence that there is a link between perception and production to the extent that perceptual learning generally transferred to improved production. However, there may be little correlation between degrees of learning in perception and production after training in perception, due to the wide range of individual variation in learning strategies. The same can happen with colors (for them, depending on whether the language/culture has a name for them). So what you write is not 100% true. At best, it's debatable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception_of_English_/r/_and_/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception_of_English_/r/_and_... l/_by_Japanese_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_... https://eagereyes.org/blog/2011/you-only-see-colors-you-can-name https://eagereyes.org/blog/2011/you-only-see-colors-you-can-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction... https://www.businessinsider.com.au/what-is-blue-and-how-do-we-see-color-2015-2 https://www.businessinsider.com.au/what-is-blue-and-how-do-w...