There's a certain bulletin board that I'm a lurker on. It's all ex-pat English teachers working in Japan. They are almost entirely junior high and elementary school teachers, so much of the school stuff they talk about I no longer have to concern myself with, so I find it better to just remain a silent observer to the occasionally useful, often frustrating conversations.
This past week, a conversation thread about words and phrases that are annoying, several of the users complained about the Japanese pronunciations of English words, specifically singling out TV. The example give was a particular shoe store called ABC Mart. In Japanese it gets pronounced as エービーシーマート (approximately ei-bi-shi-maato). Admittedly, the second only sounds vaguely like the English pronunciation. But at this point, is it really English any more? No, it isn't. For starters, the alphabet is NOT the exclusive property of the English speaking world. Go to Scandinavia. The first letter of the alphabet is not pronounced the same way English speakers say it. So, any particular argument about how to say the letters becomes dicey in the first place. And then there's the word mart, or マート. At this point, it's become a loan word, hasn't it? When speaking Japanese, and saying the name of the store, if you were to pronounce it as it were English, it would be horribly incongruous. Mart is English. マート (maato) is Japanese now.
When we speak English, do we say entrepreneur with a French accent? Do we say gestalt with a German accent? Only when we're being pretentious. Once a word becomes widely used in a second language, it becomes a loan word and the new language can do with the original word as it likes. Yes, you are allowed to bemoan that fact. But I am then allowed to call you a dick. Deal with it.
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While I agree with your observations about loan words not being the same as the original word, it is interesting to see what happens to words that could become loan words but don't. Particularly in nations where English is spoken with a decidedly non-local accent, such as Sweden. Listening to Swedish radio, for example, you'll hear the announcer using loan words (parapoly, for example, a French loan for umbrella), and then reporting on an American phenomenon. The potential loan words are pronounced now in a decidedly English accent. Names, in particular, get a distinct English accent if they are English names. The same can't be said for German or French names. I suspect that as the source of loan words gets more and more familiar to a large part of the population there is less need to borrow the word and inflect it in the mother tongue. Will this ever happen in the east? I doubt it.
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