>>105780760Well, first off, the term is taken from Nabokov's novel, Lolita, and he pronounced it (in English and in Russian) as 'low-lee-tah'.
Second, in Japanese, Lolita is pronounced 'roh-ree-tah', since they don't distinguish between L and R sounds. The vowels, however, are pronounced almost exactly the same (the final 'tah' is slightly different). The long 'oh' and 'ee' for the i are the same, however. This is a fortuitous coincidence, since Japanese has very strict and limited phonemes, which makes adapting foreign words to their lexicon an imprecise practice at the best of times. Lolita, by chance, happened to be very easy for them to adopt since its vowels lined up almost perfectly with native Japanese ones and the phonetic structure of the word also obeys Japanese syllable rules (3 consonant-vowel pairs). It probably caught on because of how easy it was for the Japanese to pronounce the original word, they didn't have to torture its spelling to fit it into their limited phonemes.
This concludes your lesson in Japanese grammar.
TL;DR no you're wrong, it's pronounced the way I said it was.
