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<h2>メルヘンチック</h2>
<p>The title is a Japanese word meaning &quot;fairy-tale-like&quot;, and can be transcribed as &quot;meruhenchikku&quot;.
Notes on pronunciation: both <em>e</em> are roughly the first <em>e</em> in <em><u>e</u>nter</em>; the <em>r</em> is a single-tap &quot;r&quot; as in Spanish &quot;caro&quot;; both <em>u</em> are roughly the stressed sound in English &quot;you&quot; halfway between the initial &quot;i&quot; and the final low &quot;u&quot;; the <em>ch</em> is like an English &quot;ch&quot; but brought closer to &quot;t&quot; while also raising its pitch; and the <em>i</em> is short but with the quality of English &quot;beat&quot;, not English &quot;bit&quot;.
The double <em>k</em> indicates a small pause.</p>
<p>The etymology of this word is funny.
In German, there is word <em>Märchen</em> that means &quot;fairy-tale&quot;; its adaptation into Japanese phonology became &quot;meruhen&quot; (メルヘン).
The &quot;-chikku&quot; part, however, comes from English.</p>
<h3>English</h3>
<p>There are a number of adjectives ending in <em>-ic</em> in English: romantic, alcoholic, metallic, etc.
These generally come from Latin <em>-icus</em> (<a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-icus#Latin">wiktionary</a>) where English dropped the <em>-us</em>/<em>-um</em> ending as usual.
This originally came from Proto-Indo-European <em>-kos</em> (<a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-cus#Latin">wiktionary</a>).
Some of the <em>-icus</em> words in Latin happen to have a <em>t</em> in front of it, and hence some English words also do: romantic, galactic, etc.</p>
<p>While <em>-ic</em> is not particularly productive any more in English, it appears in enough words its meaning would be clear if it is added as-is to an existing word.
Adding <em>-tic</em> to a word in English for this purpose would make little sense.</p>
<h3>Japanese</h3>
<p>However, Japanese is not bound by such compunctions and decided that <em>-tic</em> is what the suffix shall be, rendered in Japanese phonology as &quot;chikku&quot; (チック) because they don't naturally have a clean &quot;t&quot;, nor a &quot;k&quot; without a following vowel.
Naturally, thus, it makes perfect sense to build the word <em>Märchen-tic</em>, i.e. meruhenchikku: fairy-tale-like.</p>
<p>That's all I had, hope you considered this a good use of 3 minutes of your time.</p>