Thread:WhiteSamurai/@comment-4784862-20150515025553/@comment-4784862-20150515180927

That's not how katakana works, though. It's a phonetic representation of the words (i.e. how they SOUND, not how they're SPELLED). This is why "magic item" is "majikku aitemu" (マジック・アイテム) in katakana.

アウロ would be a-u-ro, not au-ro. There's only two phonemes in the word given by the author (the ー is used to extend the sound of the first). There's two examples I can give to explain this.

CIA would be - シーアイエー (shi-aie-) - the イ is a 'glide' character that changes how the letter is pronounced from "a" to "ai"...as in アイ is how you would spell out "Eye" phonetically with katakana.

Automobile, though...is the key example here. The katakana used for that is オートモビル, which would be O-tomobiru instead of "アウトモビル". See the relevance to オーロ? ^^

This is how my friend explained it, because I double checked with him before posting this again. I didn't think it was how it worked, but I wasn't sure how to explain it properly, heh.

It can definitely be a name  derived  from Latin (not a direct word for word representation, of course). Basically...how he said it to me was: If you gave an english speaker "Oro" they'd use a short "o" to pronounce it (which isn't what the katakana says), but if you give them "Auro" they'll draw it out. It may indeed be better suited to "Oro" if it were going to Italian from Japanese...but it's not. ^^ Anyway...he also gave me this URL that explains how the single vowels are pronounced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgIFGeiWqHU