Quote:
Originally Posted by layzee
I know this was almost 10 years ago but I don't think that's quite true. There are plenty of words with the short i sound:
Guilty Gear ギルティギア
Tales of Destiny テイルズオブデスティニー
Indignation インディグネイション (spell from the intro of Tales of Phantasia)
Unless those "i" are fundamentally and linguistically different from the one in "live"? I'm not an English scholar so I dunno. You tell me.
"Give" seems to be a word in Japanese (ギブ). "Live" however doesn't seem to be recognised as katakana. But if it did, it would probably look like リィブ or リブ.
Or maybe this whole Live thing is just a case of Engrish and we're trying to make sense of something that doesn't inherently have any. I'm going with this option unless more information arises.
|
Japanese doesn't have short vowels at all. The ones you mentioned are all long "ee" sounds, even where the English transliteration would be short "ih" sounds. The
i in
Live (pronounced like "alive") is actually a diphthong of "ah" and "ee," which does exist in Japanese and is the one used in the title of this game. If they wanted to approximate the way "live" sounds as a verb, it would be リブ (pronounced roughly the same as the German "lieb"), but again that's with a long "ee" sound. They may have gotten their Japanization of the word from the loanword ライブ, which means live show or performance.
In any case, I'd chalk this all up as another case of weird English used for marketing to non-English speakers just because it sounds cool and not because it has some deeper meaning.