Thread:WhiteSamurai/@comment-4784862-20150515025553/@comment-159.147.50.15-20150515193430

I understand your explanation about how katakana works, since it's the same that I was saying. Katakana shows pronunciation (filtered through Japanese ears, though).

What I'm trying to say is that ->in Latin, whith few exceptions, each letter corresponds with a single phoneme<-, different from modern English. "Auro" is read, in Latin, as [au̯ɾo], which is rendered in katakana as アウロ (following the same 'glide' system you speak of). オー to represent "au" appears either in French loanwords (where that combination of letters is read like that, [oː]) or in English loanwords where it's originally realized as [ˈɔː] or [ˈô] (both lenghtened back mid-vowels, one mid-open and one mid-close, filtered by Japanese hearing as just the lenghtened back mid-vowel [oː]). "Automobile" is transcripted as オートモビル because the pronunciation in English is [ˈɔːtəməbiːl] (UK) or [ˈôdəmōˌbēl] (US), and they picked the UK pronunciation as the standard.

I doubt neither the author nor the MC have knowledge enough about romance linguistics to try derivating words from Latin on their own, so, by Occam's razor, they have most probably taken it from Italian since is the only Latin-derived language that fits the given pronunciation (or at least, the only major or semimajor one).