Pentax Hericoid???

revdocjim · Mar 6, 2011

Believe it or not, that is how it is spelled right on the product!
I'm talking about the Asahi Pentax Helicoid Extension Tube. I found one today and it is genuine Pentax, not a third party.

It's rather comical because Japanese often mix up L and R when speaking and writing English. Someone must have caught this error before it was exported to the U.S. At least I hope they did!

Front side (un-extended)

Back side (extended)

lxdude · Mar 6, 2011

Hm. When I lived in Phoenix, I worked with with a woman from Japan who, despite being quite fluent in English, and handling L's and R's quite well, would get mixed up on spelling. For instance, she had a file folder marked "Fragstaff".

paul ewins · Mar 6, 2011

Mine is spelled correctly but is otherwise identical - maybe yours is an early version?

Steve Smith · Mar 6, 2011

To be fair, the Japanese do not mix up L and R, they just pronounce the L like an R (and R like R).

Steve.

revdocjim · Mar 6, 2011

Steve Smith said:
To be fair, the Japanese do not mix up L and R, they just pronounce the L like an R (and R like R).

Steve.

I beg to differ... there is no sound in the Japanese language that is like an English L or R. It is actually easier for most Japanese speakers to pronounce a clean L rather than an R. But in practice the ら、り、る、れ、ろ letters in their alphabet are written with an R when romanized (ra, ri, ru, re, ro) and that leads to a lot of confusion. Many Japanese who study English even have a hard time hearing the difference between L and R when they are spoken. And English speakers who study Japanese often begin by pronouncing those letters with an R sound.

But... all of that is neither here nor there! The interesting point here is that Pentax initially seems to have produced a product with a glaring typo but then corrected it somewhere along the line.

NormanV · Mar 6, 2011

The Kikuyu from Kenya have the same problem. I lived there for ten years and thought that the Kiswahili for pumpkin was marenge when it should have been malenge (or was it the other way round?)

Klainmeister · Mar 6, 2011

Check out the Mitsubishi Starion--it was supposed to be called a Stallion but was imported to the US as Starion and they couldn't publicly change that.

tkamiya · Mar 6, 2011

I am from Japan and I must admit, I mix up Ls and Rs all the time both in spelling and pronunciation. In my native language, there is neither L nor R sound - there is something in between. Often times, they both sound alike to my ears even after decades of speaking English only.

Klainmeister · Mar 6, 2011

Yeah, one of my old band mates was japanese and had the same issues. I think no matter the language there is going to be mess ups. It just so happens that the L and R difference is large enough that it can sometimes be humorous to us native speakers. I speak German and my German friends would always say "you live in the Villamette Walley" instead of the opposite on the W and Vs. Pretty funny--god only know what I mess up in German...

lxdude · Mar 6, 2011

tkamiya said:
I am from Japan and I must admit, I mix up Ls and Rs all the time both in spelling and pronunciation. In my native language, there is neither L or R sound - there is something in between. Often times, they both sound alike to my ears even after decades of speaking English only.

I was just going to ask revdocjim about that. I wondered if it was something in between. That would shed light on why, to many English speakers, the L sounds like R and the R sounds like L.
I worked with people from Japan quite a bit, and to me it was closer to an R sound. Some had names like Reiko and Toru, but none with an L sound. To me the sound is closer to the short R sound in the Spanish I heard growing up than to the generic American (the kind I speak) R sound.
The woman I mentioned would try to figure out spelling by sounding out the word and deciding that way, but sometimes she would guess wrong. She was a perfectionist about her work and was embarrassed about her mistakes. After she got to know me and discovered I was a good speller, she would always ask me about the spelling of words she was unsure of. She delighted in the opportunity to perfect her work.

lxdude · Mar 6, 2011

Klainmeister said:
Yeah, one of my old band mates was japanese and had the same issues. I think no matter the language there is going to be mess ups. It just so happens that the L and R difference is large enough that it can sometimes be humorous to us native speakers. I speak German and my German friends would always say "you live in the Villamette Walley" instead of the opposite on the W and Vs. Pretty funny--god only know what I mess up in German...

Years ago I worked with a man from Sri Lanka. We worked in a place near the Napa Valley named Pope Valley. He pronounced it "Pope Wally". It always made me think of other unlikely names for the Pope- like Pope Freddy, Pope Bill, Pope Ed. And wonder, if Wally's the Pope, is Eddie Haskell the Devil?

One time I picked up the mail and there was a letter for him from Sri Lanka. There it was in the address- Pope Wally.

tkamiya · Mar 6, 2011

It's difficult for me to explain the sound to you because there is no such sound in English language. It's truly in between L and R. Try sounding "R" without touching tip of your tongue to top of your mouth or rolling but touch where your top teeth comes out of the gum line. Also try to widen your mouth sideways a bit. If you do that, you get something close.

My girlfriend (who is an American and a former English teacher) says my pronunciations are unusually good for a foreign language speaker except for my occasional errors in Ls and Rs. (oh yeah, and also misplaced articles, such as "the".... there is no such thing in Japanese either) I just accept both as something I would never be able to do perfectly every time. (like getting dust free negatives!)

Whenever I say something incorrectly, she tries to figure it out by swapping Ls and Rs. I can tell she just did that because she starts to giggle.... We've been doing this for 20 years...

That reminds me... in my school days, kids used to try to get me to say words like "color", or "Lincoln", or "calculator"..... They didn't giggle. They laughed.... funny memories..... from long past.

lxdude · Mar 6, 2011

Oh man, I just remembered something... One time I was getting directions (in the days before the internet) to a company in Corona, Calif. The guy on the phone was from Japan. The instructions included two streets which intersected and I was to turn from one onto the other. The names of the streets are Rincon and Lincoln. I got very confused, and I guess he thought I was an idiot!

ntenny · Mar 6, 2011

L and R are actually much mechanically closer than a lot of English speakers realise. Pronounce them both and pay attention to how your mouth and tongue are sitting as you do.

A long time ago, I had a job where I had to catalogue a bunch of blueprints for a hydroelectric powerhouse, some of which had been contracted out to a Japanese company (I don't remember what their name was). We actually had a blueprint labelled "Rabyrinth Runner"!

-NT

Wade D · Mar 7, 2011

There is a site called Engrish.com which is quite funny. Most of the content is photos of signs and such which have been badly translated to English.

Steve Smith · Mar 7, 2011

revdocjim said:
I beg to differ... there is no sound in the Japanese language that is like an English L or R. It is actually easier for most Japanese speakers to pronounce a clean L rather than an R.

In the 1980s I went to a conference held by Hitachi on their liquid crystal displays. All of the Japanese staff pronounced display as dispray. Only the one Chinese person there could pronounce it properly. The Japanese didn't appear to have any trouble with R sounds in any words.

Steve.

revdocjim · Mar 7, 2011

Yes, the sound in question is similar to a rolled R in Spanish, but with only one roll or slap of the tongue rather than multiple, high speed slaps. And when written in the Roman alphabet it is always spelled with an R. But it is very difficult of for native speakers of Japanese to make the R sound that we do in English, especially at the beginning of words. When it comes later in a word the pronunciation differs even among English speakers depending on where you are. But the R sound in rat, rap, ride, run etc. is quite difficult for a native Japanese speaker.

The fact that it sounds like an L, or that the two are indistinguishable seems so strange to native English speakers, but as tkamiya has said... it really is an issue for native Japanese speakers. Of course there are sounds in Japanese that are very difficult for English speakers to pronounce correctly or even distinguish when hearing them spoken.

What goes around comes around!

In the case of "helicoid", in Japanese it is written ヘリコイド and when you turn around and write that out in the Roman alphabet it gets spelled "hericoido". Pentax knew enough to drop the final "o" but they missed the "r". When I saw the price tag in the store for this tube it said "hericoid" in English and I almost pointed out the error to the clerk; but then I looked at the product and smiled!

Steve Roberts · Mar 7, 2011

A former colleague worked for Rank Radio International (who had previously subsumed Bush Radio, for those who remember them) when RRI were taken over by Toshiba.
His name was Len Roberts (no relation) and whilst he was an easy-going sort of chap, the years spent being addressed by his new boss as "Ren Loberts" still grated on him!
Steve

lxdude · Mar 7, 2011

revdocjim said:
Yes, the sound in question is similar to a rolled R in Spanish, but with only one roll or slap of the tongue rather than multiple, high speed slaps.

Yeah, definitely not trilled!

What goes around comes around!

Yep, considering western speakers managed to turn "Nippon" into "Japan"!

tkamiya · Mar 7, 2011

lxdude said:
Yeah, definitely not trilled!

Japanese "R" doesn't have any rolling of tongue. With English "R", you'd touch tip of your tongue to middle of roof of your mouth while Japanese "R" touche the gum line.

By the way "TH" is anouther sound Japanese speakers have huge problems. Many can't even do it and end up with "she" sound.

holmburgers · Mar 7, 2011

This all comes down to categorical perception. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_perception

Verbal sounds are on an infinite continuum and so we create "categories" that encapsulate a broad range of sounds into one sound. And like others have said, English's L & R straddle the Japanese ra/ri/ru/re/ro

This causes endless joy for me and my kanojo-no-nihonjin

cfclark · Mar 8, 2011

No one's even touched on the Japanese sounds represented in English as ryu and ryo, which in my two college years of Japanese, I never quite mastered. (One of my college classmates was a Ms. Ryu, and her surname was inevitably pronounced "Roo", as in "kanga-".)

Pentax Hericoid???

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