04-30-2009, 09:32 PM
Here's a tip to everyone out there. If you want to know how to write a foreign name in Japanese, just find a famous person on Wikipedia and on the left-hand side there's a link to articles about the person in the various Wikipedia languages. See how the article renders the name. It's often trivial to do this. I usually do this intead of attempting to transliterate it myself because Japanese does very unexpected things when transliterating names.
Taking koekoeka at his word, "Marit" probably works as either メイリット or マリット. The first is closer to the pronunciation, but Japanese has a tendency to, what I call, anglicize words. For example, "Aaron" in US English sounds like エーロン, but in UK English sounds like アーロンor アロン. Even an American named Aaron tends to have the name アロン when written in Japanese despite the pronunciation difference. Similarly, Marit may end up being マリット or マーリット depending on where the accent is placed in Dutch.
Now, the ending of Marit is less of a problem. Japanese tends to romanize things that end in "d" or "t" sounds as ト. The word "bed" is written ベット, for example.
The caveat with regards to my Wikipedia hint for you is to make sure you find a person whose name is not only spelled like yours, but is sourced the same. Case in point: koekoeka said "Marit" has "a" like in "day." But Marit Allen, a UK journalist, is "a" like "father," so マリット (what you find on Wikipedia for Marit Allen) may not be correct for koekoeka's "Marit."
Basically, what I'm trying to say is that having someone transliterate your name into Japanese when country-of-origin comes into play is nigh impossible over the internet. Consult a local Japanese person face-to-face or someone you can find online who speaks Dutch and Japanese.
On a side note, Marit Larsen (found via Wikipedia) is quite the attractive lady.
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