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Talk:Mike Goutokuji

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Revision as of 00:30, 22 March 2021 by GMEStanley (talk | contribs)
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About "Mike"

Although this is exactly how ZUN spelled it, "Mike" is way too common as an English male name which has already caused confusion from people who had little Japanese knowledge. In a case like this, should we take the liberty to use accented 'é' similar to "saké"?

This wiki always takes kana romanization at face value. Nue and Sanae don't have it. And there was a whole editing war over 女苑 (Jo'on vs. Joon) that ended up not keeping the apostrophe. Same thing happened with any spellings of レイセン other than "Reisen". 魔理沙, although looking like an English name, is pronounced "Mah-ri-sa" rather than "Muh-ri-sa" but the wiki still keeps "Marisa" instead of changing the romanization so that English speakers can intuitively pronounce it.
I guess the real question here is if it matters. Does it either way? Way too many people say "Sanay" and "New" and "Muhrisa" already. Your suggestion ignores that the ミ in ミケ is pronounced "mee", whereas the Mi in Mike is pronounced "mai". Shouldn't it then be "Míké"? I wouldn't be opposed to a non-standard romanization but honestly using accent marks makes it look like her name is European or something and opens up a whole seperate conversation about romanization in general.
Ennin (talk) 10:50, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
The names are spelled in IPA right under to give an idea of how to pronounce them anyway, so using a non-standard romanization for that purpose is kinda redundant. Of course, not many know it but if we need to make the pronunciation clear, those spellings are already there for that reason.
GMEStanley (talk) 00:29, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Please, for the love of all that is holy, do not do this. People are going to joke about it no matter what you do, and that's all it ever could be: a joke. People who don't know Japanese? Sucks for them, they'll figure it out eventually. That's how it is with everything else relating to language. Trying to "correct" the romanization, as if the creator made some grievous error, is always the wrong way to go about this, every single time, in every single situation. I feel so bad for people like Takashi Miike...

Never "fix" official romanizations. Never "correct" official terms. You are not ever "fixing" or "correcting" anything when you do that. This is an ironclad rule with such a tiny amount of exceptions (honest to goodness typos that the creator usually mentions somewhere, the same term being written differently in different places, etc) that they aren't even worth talking about. Even the Eva community uses "Children" almost to a fault. I have never understood why the Touhou community is unwilling to show this very basic respect. Despatche (talk) 23:50, 21 March 2021 (UTC)