掲示板 Forums - Katakana spellings for loanwords

Personally, I find this the most annoying part of learning the Words for Japanese Basics.

I love learning actual Japanese words, but all these loanwords are so weird. I know how to speak and write them in English, but their katakana spellings have no apparent logic to them.

We have to remember that 'violin' is not spelled with ヴィ, but instead with バイ

'Salad' doesn't end with ド (like pretty much every other loanword ending in 'd') but instead with ダ. Why?

'Soccer' doesn't start with ソ like you'd expect, but instead with サ

'Shirt' and 'suit' both end with ツ, but 'note' and 'passport' and 'arbeit' end with ト. Those are all the same ending sound!

'Ear' as in 'earring' starts with イヤ, but 'air' as in 'aircon' starts with エア

'Chocolate' is チョコレート ... really?

I can't see any pattern or logic to any of this, which makes it really hard to memorise, so I'm always making mistakes on these words in the quiz. It feels pretty stupid to be making mistakes on English words when I'm a native English speaker!

Anyway that's all, I just wanted to vent about this.

Just so you know, there are a few variants of violin:

ヴァイオリン

バイオリン

ヴィオロン

#ビオロン

In Japanese, you'll typically see the B sound instead of the V sound, because the V sound isn't really a Japanese sound, and as such it might just get pronounced as a B anyway.

For the other words it is important to realize that most words that use katakana are trying to mimic the *sounds* of the original words , not their spelling.

e.g. when we say soccer it sounds like it starts with a "sa" not "so".

Not for me! I'm Australian, so when I say 'soccer' it very definitely starts with 'so'. It sounds like 'sock-ah'. I guess this loanword came via the US, so in order to remember how to write it in kana, I have to stop and think about how an アメリカ人 would say it.

This frustrated me until I started a schedule of around ~2000 food-related words with an ample serving of Katakana loanwords, and this is frankly nothing compared to the nonsense that is ポッサム (written as POssamu, when it should be BOssamu, for Bossam...) There are countless other instances of BO and PO getting flipped around for no apparent reason, plus some odd non-food loanwords like イギリス that sound nothing like the common English pronunciations you'd hear.

At some point, my annoyance turned into mild amusement because I can translate MOST Katakana words with some mental gymnastics. I've honestly had to say words out loud multiple times before the English translation "clicked" because the Katakana was so absurd that it stopped bearing a resemblance to the original word... I recently spent an embarrassing amount of time saying "エリザベス" over and over because none of it was comprehensible. It took me about 5 minutes to realize "Erizabesu" means "Elizabeth."

Yeah, the names of countries are a rich source of oddball loans. My favourite is probably ブラジル for Brazil. I mean, it does make a certain kind of sense ... it really is the closest mapping to Japanese phonemes as far as I can see. But, man, if you didn't already know what it meant, you'd never be able to reverse the meaning from the kana.

イギリス is a particularly funny one, because *we can't spell it right either*. In English, the word "english" starts with an 'e' but absolutely nobody says it that way. It is always said 'inglish'.

The kana could definitely have been closer, though. インギリス for example.

Thanks mate, that made for interesting reading