Walking through the streets of T'áichūng's 臺中 Īchūngchiēh 一中街 area every Tuesday evening on the way to my weekly Mandarin lesson makes me feel old. Chock full of students (as well as those of school-age), all the businesses there (food stands, tea houses, clothing stores and so on) cater to the youth market. In an environment such as this, it's only natural to see English and Japanese being employed in an attempt to ratchet up points on the coolness scale, and bring in the young punters. And as anyone who has been in East Asia can tell you, sometimes the results aren't always so successful. A case in point is this stand selling oden おでん, or Kuāntūngchǔ 關東煮 as it's called here in T'áiwān 台灣 (from the Japanese Kantō-ni 関東煮, which is what oden is apparently called in Nagoya 名古屋):
The mistake in this case lies with the phonetic transliteration of Kantō into hiragana 平仮名. It should look like this: かんとう. But instead of the final う, the sign maker used the katakana 片仮名 syllabogram ラ, which looks similar, but is written in roman letters as "ra". Thus, we have "kantora" in a weird hybrid of two syllabic writing systems. This kind of mistake is not uncommon in Taiwan.
No comments:
Post a Comment