On the front page of today’s NYT: “What’s in a Name? For Apple, iPad Said More Than Intended” by Brad Stone), about a series of problems with the name iPad.
Item 1: “Many women are saying the name evokes awkward associations with feminine hygiene products.”
Item 2: “People from Boston to Ireland are complaining that “iPad,” in their regional brogue, sounds almost indistinguishable from “iPod,” Apple’s music player. The problem may be worse outside the United States: Japanese does not even have a sound for the “a” in iPad.”
Item 3: “Two other high-tech companies already market products called iPad and are laying claim to the trademark.”
On 1: the association of pad with feminine hygiene seems to be strong. One result of this has been that “iTampon” swiftly became a popular trending topic on Twitter.
It turns out that Mad TV did a comedy sketch in 2005 about a then-fictional Apple device called the iPad (“Why use a maxi pad when there’s the new iPad from Apple?”). NPR’s Morning Edition did an interview on January 28 with two of the show’s writers: transcript here, audio here. YouTube video of the sketch here.
On 2: a number of English dialects realize the phoneme /a/ (as in pod) with a somewhat fronted vowel that is close to the realization of the phoneme /æ/ (as in pad) in those dialects. And many languages don’t have a phonemic distinction between /a/ and /æ/, realizing the second in English words as the first.
On 3: Apple has been through trademark disputes before, notably over iPhone. Steve Jobs has a record of bulldozing the competition.
January 29, 2010 at 10:47 am |
The Japanese angle is perplexing: Japanese パ (pa) as I hear it in Tokyo is reasonably close to the ‘pa’ as I say it in iPad, and most importantly it is very easily distinguished from the ポ (po) as in iPod. I guess it’s just another case of ‘foreign-language-x doesn’t have a word/sound for Y’.
January 29, 2010 at 1:04 pm |
Regarding #2, isn’t the problem here that most of us Americans have merged /ɒ/ into /ɑː/? Thus while iPod “should” be [ˈaɪˌpɒd], it’s instead [ˈaɪˌpɑd] in GA; with iPad as [ˈaɪˌpæd].
Meanwhile, don’t the accents that front /ɑ/ to near [æ] all maintain the rounding of /ɒ/?
Or— have non-GA accents borrowed GA’s /ˈaɪˌpɑːd/ pronunciation, with the unrounded and for-them-mergeable second vowel?
January 29, 2010 at 4:29 pm |
I don’t believe that any native accents of English merge “pod” and “pad”, except for some in the Caribbean. And any speakers that do have this merger would have a whole host of other potential confusions such as “pat” = “pot”, “tap” = “top”, “rat” = “rot”, etc.
A far more likely source of confusion would be when a speaker with the Northern Cities Vowel Shift talks to a listener from a different region. When the speaker says “iPod”, the listener would likely interpret it as “iPad” — particularly if spoken in isolation.
February 14, 2010 at 12:21 pm |
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