erinja:(Cheers to our Brit and Aussie forum readers! But yeah, to the Yankee ear, you guys call each other "mate" all the time, we really have no US equivalent).

No prob mate - I find this funny actually, I think I've almost converted some Americans I've met over the internet to saying "mate" like an Australian I guess we're just so grouse that everyone wants to copy our speech patterns (or writing patterns) .

I guess the US. equivalent would probably be "bro" (I'm assuming it's from the US), although despite being convenient and cool "bro" does limit itself by being for people who can actually physically be a brother, namely males.

I guess a good way to emulate the femininity of Joshigo (not familiar with the term but I'm assuming we're talking about "female language" (joshi + go) and that this includes "atashi" and "anata/anta"?) would be using "caring" speech, e.g. overuse of things like "kara" and other affectionate terms, even if it is an innately evil female character (after all, affectionate terms followed by the dispatching of several other characters is very scary).

Esperanto only has one personal pronoun which makes it hard to keep a lot of the meanings preserved. I wouldn't seriously suggest it, but the pun "virdire" tickled my fancy.

Ore wa onna da! (I'm a woman [very masculine]) - Virdire, virino mi estas!

Although a translation that preserved some of the nuance in a standard way could be: Diable, ino mi estas!

I wonder how it would come off if you said "Mi estas malviro!"

If the woman had a title, you could also have them calling themselves by a masculine version of that title; so, a Duchess calling herself "Duke", for example. That would only work in limited situations. I guess you'd really have to go on a case by case basis to choose the right way to get the meaning across.

Or you could be crude, in a masculine way! "Je miaj pilkoj, mi estas virino!"

erinja:I wonder how it would come off if you said "Mi estas malviro!"

I just about choked on my fruit salad by laughter reading this.

Although that is quite a good idea in retrospect (and after a bit of coughing trying to get that piece of apricot out of my right lung).

This could be further expanded to creating a masculine style of speech in Esperanto. For example, a "masculine" style of speech in Japanese uses arrogant or obnoxious sounding pronouns ("ore" - I, and there was a good one for you as well.... I think "kimi" though should be alright). In Esperanto I think the same could be achieved by (over)using "mal", even when there is a neutral opposite already.

For example, a male character could refer to a foreigner as a "malsxtatano" (uncitizen) - basically using "mal" to make certain qualities seem to be simply an absence of another quality which the character might possess.

So we could have:
"Malsxtatano"
"malviro"
etc.
Anything described with "mal" would be then logically "not deserve" the value of whatever the base root has (at least in the speakers mind).

LyzTyphone:

ceigered:LyzTyphone, what's the problem with using the long vowel mark (e.g. āōīūē) or aa/ei/ii/ou/oo? After all that perfectly matches the japanese symbols (ああ／えい／おう／うう) letter for letter or sound for sound (if you use ā etc).

E.g. kawaii = kaŭaii;

I have no problem at all about aa/ii/uu/ei/ou. The B-system I mentioned actually used them.

It's those "vowel marks" that annoy me. Marks as in "ā" or "â" have never been part of Esperanto. And in fact, the "aa/ii/uu/ee/oo" or "aa/ii/uu/ei/ou" conveys the sound of Japanese long vocals just as well. So instead, I prefer to have a system purely Esperanta.

For a purely Esperanto system, you might use 'ij' for 'ii', and 'uŭ' for 'uu'. I don't know about the others but using double letters doesn't seem right to me. I might be tempted to pronounce 'aa' as two a's, not a long 'a.' (is 'ej', 'oh', 'ah' too far from 'ei' 'ou', 'aa'?)

Oŝo-Jabe:For a purely Esperanto system, you might use 'ij' for 'ii', and 'uŭ' for 'uu'. I don't know about the others but using double letters doesn't seem right to me. I might be tempted to pronounce 'aa' as two a's, not a long 'a.' (is 'ej', 'oh', 'ah' too far from 'ei' 'ou', 'aa'?)

After thinking about this, using -h as a vowel lengthener might confuse some speakers where -h could be interpreted as a consonant (/h/ or /x/).

In terms of using 'ej' I started thinking that "ej" would be incorrect because the main Japanese pronunciation of 'ei' is /e:/. And the same would go for ij and ux which EO-wise would be pronounced as /ij/ and /uw/ if there were a perfect EO speaker .

So then we get to a wonderful part of Japanse pronunciation - what is a syllable? I mean, "ei" is in normal speech pronounced as a long /e:/ sound, not a /ej/ sound. However, when the morae are broken apart, you end up with two seperate vowels, e and i, not e and e. So somewhere there's gonna be an irregularity, which English is fine with, but EO technically shouldn't be.

(as for being tempted to pronounce the 'aa' as two syllables, that is actually a great mindset as in Japanese this technically should be two syllables - although in normal speech vowels get joined together just like in English: "naïve" should be /na'iv/ but is always pronounced /naj'iv/ except when the person has a reason to break it up).

An interesting thing to discuss, Especially since morae muck around with the 'ei' combo (not sure about ou).

(Japanese morae - Wikipedia probably has more info if needed.)