It all started that day. I was then in third grade, and I got on my computer, unaware. Then I came across a game of some language that I couldn’t understand then. But when I read the link to the game, I realized that it was a Korean game, so I looked up the Korean alphabet.
But all of a sudden, Dad burst into my room and asked me, “Can आप learn Japanese?”
So I looked up the Japanese language, and the first thing I searched was the alphabet. The first thing I saw was that Japanese had different sets of alphabets, but I didn’t know their names yet. I just skimmed the alphabets.
But one strange thing I noticed was that there were no characters with L.
Then I thought, “So there’s no एल in Japanese?”
So I looked up the Japanese word for “Lebanon”, and it was transliterated as “Rebanon”. So I learned that because there was no एल in Japanese, they replaced it with R. It was a fact so interesting that I fell in प्यार with learning Japanese. Learning Japanese felt like going to a कल्पना world, like Hogwarts, डिज़्नी World, या Wonderland.
Not only did I look at the alphabet, but I also read a bit about the culture, like the काप, कार्प festivals, doll festivals, musical instruments, like the koto and taiko, the different types of sushi, like maki, nigiri, and chirashi, and the different types of origami, like planes, cranes, and boats.
The अगला year, in fourth grade, a Japanese visitor came to my math class one day. Her name was Mayumi. She read us a classic Japanese story called Momotaro the आड़ू, पीच Boy, where an elderly couple got a baby from a giant peach, hence the name Momotaro. Then she asked, “How do आप say Dallas in Japanese?”
I had that fact in my mind, but I couldn’t spill it out of my mind.
Then she said, “There is no एल in the Japanese language, so we replace it with R, so we say Darasu.”
In sixth grade, I learned that in Korean, the ㄹ character sounded और like R in initial position and एल in final position, like “ramyeon” and “hangeul”. And like in Japanese, “Lebanon” became “Rebanon”, and “lemon” became “remon”. It was probably because एल and R sounded similar in those languages. And their R was actually a flap sound, nothing like English, and not even rolled as in Spanish. But Japanese and Koreans were not the only languages to replace their L’s with R’s. There was Maori, a language mostly spoken in New Zealand, like “Bulgaria” became “Purukaria”, and Hawaiian did vice versa, like “Russia” became “Lukia”.