In a manga/webcomic I like, there’s a character who is Lithuania (as in, the anthropomorphicized nation of Lithuania) who’s human name is transliterated from Japanese as Toris.
However, I’ve heard protests from fans that ‘Toris’ is an inappropriate name for a person, much less for the nation of Lithuania itself, and is the sort of name that a dog or a cat might be given. The suspicion is that the author meant to name the character Tolys (a legitimate Lithuanian name) but that due to the limitations of katakana it was rendered as Toris when converted to Roman letters. But I’ve never heard the straight dope from someone who is actually Lithuanian or speaks Lithuanian to be sure.
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Title changed from "Question about a Lithuanian name (Toris/Tolys) " to “Japanese transliteration of a Lithuanian name (Toris/Tolys).”
(Hopefully, that will draw some of our Japanese-speaking members as well)
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I don’t speak or read Japanese, but as I understand it this language has no phonemic distinction between what we think of as ‘l’ and ‘r’. Similarly, the writing system(s) do not distinguish between those two sounds. So what might have happened is that the author named Lithuania “Tolys” and transliterated this name into Japanese characters. Then, when the English translation of the work was done, the translator, unfamiliar with Lithuanian culture, didn’t realise that the name of Lithuania was supposed to be “Tolys” and not “Toris”, both of whom would have been written the same way in Japanese.
I’ll wait for someone who actually knows more about Japanese or Lithuanian than I do to make a more definitive guess.
If I understand your question, yes “Toris” or “Torisu” might be how the katakana would read.
Lithuanian to Japanese to Romaji would go
Tolys>Torisu>Toris.
I’m assuming “Tolys” is pronounced like it sounds, I have no experience with Lithuanian culture. There is no way to end a name in a pure “S” sound natively.
Yes, when Japanese takes names from other languages it has two problems:
(1) Some consonants and vowels do not match Japanese consonants and vowels exactly, so they take the closest Japanese one. The case of “l” and “r” both mapping to the Japanese “r” is just one example.
(2) The only consonant that can end a word in Japanese is “n”, so other consonants get mapped to a syllable with a vowel, e.g., “s” to “su” and “t” to “to”. (However, the usual pronunciation of “su” is with the “u” hardly audible, so “daisuki” [love] sounds like “daiski”, and “Torisu” would sound like “Toris”.)
An example where a foreign word becomes almost unrecognisable when turned into Japanese is “love” turning into “rabu” – every phoneme in English has been changed to something close, but different.
In Japanese, is there a connotative difference between “rabu” and the native word “ai”? Maybe something akin to the difference in English between “love” and “amour”?
Y’all, it’s nice to have the katakana explained but I’m really more interested in whether ‘Toris’ is a horribly offensive name to use with regard to a Lithuanian character. If it is, I would rather switch to Tolys.
To be fair, it wasn’t terribly clear from your OP what you wanted to know, and people tried to answer what you appeared to be asking.
I understand some Lithuanian, and I have no reason to think that the name Toris sounds terribly inappropriate or offensive. However it does not exist as a personal name in Lithuania. According to my dictionary the Lithuanian word “toris” means the chemical element thorium or a “tory” in the political sense.
Tolys is a boy’s name in Lithuanian, but extremely rare, and no child has been named that in at least the last 10 years.
The katakana used for the manga character is not a correct representation of either Toris or Tolys.
So as far as I can see, you could happily use either when you are talking about the character in English. If you choose to call him Tolys, it’s pronounced Tolees, with the stress on the second syllable.