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Comment by pesfandiar | Hacker News Reader

That and it's apparently making fun of Japanese accent ("sarariman"). It's a pity that this is the top comment on HN right now.

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Apparently you don't know about katakana, its a form of the Japanese alphabet that is specifically used for foreign words translated to Japanese. The pronunciation of these words sounds similar to their foreign counterparts. think sararimam == salaryman, hanba-gu == hamburger, terebijon == television and so on.

katakana - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana

If he really knows kana, he should write it as sarari-man as the third vowel is long vowel.

Is it a hyphen? Or would it be saraiiman? I actually don’t know.

Your form is correct based on faint recollection of what I learned in college Japanese class.

It shall be ー, but if we use that, we should also use rest of the kanas too.

It's clearly a direct transcription, rather than a translation, of サラリーマン. I doubt any mockery is intended.

Thanks for clarifying that. I might have been wrong about their intention then, but mockery seemed plausible given they were also painting a very stereotypical picture of a business meeting.

Thanks for giving me the benefit of the doubt!

As for stereotyping… maybe! But isn't "laughing a proposal out of a room" a stereotype as well?

> but mockery seemed plausible

How about we stop assuming mockery just because it might seem plausible and instead we lean toward "no offense intended" by default?

Sarariman (adapted from the English salary man) is the Japanese term for white collar worker.

Native English speakers tend to just say "salaryman" when speaking to other English speakers. Adopting a faux Japanese accent, particularly in print, is extremely cringeworthy.

Sarariman is a Japanese word, the original commenter wasn't adopting a false Japanese accent. Here's an article from the economist using the term: https://www.economist.com/special-report/1999/11/25/who-want...

I lived in Japan for years. I have never seen English speakers write "Sarariman" instead of "Salaryman" when talking about the phenomenon.

Yes, my intent was not to mock a Japanese accent, but to adopt what seemed to me the most plausible spelling. In this particular case, the Japanese concept has far eclipsed the original English word, and the term was more or less a Japanese creation in the first place[0], so that's why I spelled it that way.

In other cases, the English spelling is still dominant, so using a back-transliterated katakana spelling (e.g. "Rabu Hoteru" instead of "Love Hotel") would be just weird.

[0] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=salary+man%2Cs...

> Native English speakers tend to just say "salaryman" when speaking to other English speakers.

We don't tend to use salaryman at all. There's white-collar, businessman etc. By contrast sarariman had been popularly coined in the 90s by the Japanese.

I believe the parent meant we would say 'salaryman' when speaking of the Japanese conception of the term. Which in my experience is true. It could be because 'sarariman', though a reasonable approximation of the Japanese pronunciation, does sound like a racist caricature, but I think it is equally likely it just feels awkward to the native-english-speaking tongue.

> does sound like a racist caricature

But it isn't. How about we stop assuming offense by default and instead we try to expect that other people are as reasonable as we are? For that matter, that one is in the guidelines here.

The English word "cookie" is derived from Dutch "koekie".

If some Dutch people bring back Oreos as souvenirs from the US and call them "cookies" instead of "koekjes", are they adopting a cringeworthy faux-American accent? Making fun of how English butchers their language? Or just calling them the way Americans do, without any further judgement?

Possibly, yes.

Also see the term "barbecue". A good portion of words in any language have just been appropriated and mangled along the way.

That's the correct romanization of the Japanese word サラリーマン, which, according to the Wikipedia article on it, is a loanword whose usage dates back to before the 1930s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salaryman

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