I was watching some translation videos of some Japanese pro wrestlers I like when I saw this video. I just thought it was kinda funny and was about to move on with my life, but then it hit me that it's weird that she had a lisp in almost the exact same way an English speaker would.
"Tae-san" becoming "Tae-than" didn't make sense because the Th (θ) sound doesn't exist in Japanese. Then I remembered something from the linguistics class I took this semester. Both Th and S are fricatives and are placed in very similar places of the mouth. It's not unlikely that native Japanese speakers with speech impediments could slip into the Th sound. I wanted to check here though because a simple google search for "Japanese lisp" yielded only search results for learning Japanese with an existing speech impediment.
Also, If I'm correct about this, how exactly are these mistakes written out? There's no characters to write them with besides romaji. So how, for example, would an author of a book in Japanese make a character speak with a lisp?
by cyanide_seeds