Lady Une/Anne/Un
Bringing up what is likely a very old point of contention here, but the pronunciation of Lady Une’s name in both the Japanese and the English language dub still puzzles me. It’s supposedly French, but if that’s the case why does the pronunciation not match the spelling? In French the added ‘e’ at the end changes the pronunciation from a short ‘u’ (like the ‘u’ in English “tub”) to a long one (like the ‘u’ in English “tube”). While the Japanese phonetic system does have certain limitations when it comes to transcribing words from other languages, the distinction between un and une doesn’t present any challenges; the French feminine une should just be transcribed ウン un (ooh-n). Yet they went instead with アン an (ah-n), which is how you would transcribe the French masculine un. While it’s possible that the writers simply made a mistake, I’d rather give them more credit than that. I looked into it and it seems that very early on, before any romanized spellings were known to the audience, there was some fan speculation that her name was meant to be Lady Anne...which is a reasonable assumption if you only have the katakana to work with, as アン an (ah-n) is the correct way to write the name Anne in Japanese. Nowadays it’s pretty much always spelled Une in official materials, but while the writers probably always intended her name to be a homophone for a number in keeping with GW’s numbers-as-names theme, I don’t know that they always had this spelling and/or pronunciation in mind.
