Monday, December 28, 2020

Churi-hii


Maybe 8 years ago, I was kind of forced into listening to Japanese radio for reasons left unsaid. Every so often, there'd be an ad for something that sounded to me like "Julie-E." I asked a few people what "Julie-E" could be, and they had no idea what I was talking about. A few years later, when the ad came back on, I tried listening to the name as closely as I could, and suddenly it came out as "Churi-ii". Again, no one I asked knew what I was referring to.

Finally, in October, I was in the hospital recovering from eye surgery. I had a TV next to the bed, and when I got really bored, I'd turn it on. And then, there was this ad for the Zurich Insurance Group, promoting car insurance. And at the end, the jingle announced, "Churi-hii."

So, yeah. "Zoo-Rick" sounds exactly like "Chew-re Hee" in Japan. Go figure.

2 comments:

martin said...

To be fair though, the English pronunciation isn't any closer to the original Swiss German, [ˈt͡sʏrɪç]

TSOTE said...

I'll take your word for it. Most "how to pronounce" videos use the English pronunciation. The one example for Swiss-German I found gave a hard "ch" sound at the end, along with with "Zuree." It's not even close to the Japanese version...