One of the things I know (from observation) about the Japanese language is that words almost always end in some sort of vowel sound. Yet MANY foreign words, especially names end in a consonant.
So, how do they determine which vowel sound to add at the end of a person’s name? Is there a standard formula or set of rules?
Also, Japanese seems like it is built of consonant-vowel pairs at least to my American eye (reading Japanese words that have with the english alphabet), compared to English where letters can be arranged almost any way the original creator of a word desires. Is perception semi-accurate?
The sound of Japanese is built of syllables rather than letters. The syllables may be just a vowel, or a consonant followed by a vowel, or N by itself.
Yes, there are generally standard practices rather than rules. Also, due to a relative lack of both vowel and consonant sounds, it can be difficult to transliterate from other languages into Japanese. For example, the words “bath” and “bus” are very similar when transliterated into Japanese even though they are not very close at all in English.
For ending consonants, the following vowel is usually U, because it is customary to heavily elide the U vowel sound in many or most Japanese words that have it. Words and names can also end in N, but the sound is much more swallowed than it is in English (not a technical description but that’s the only way I know how to describe it). So “Johnson” would be more like “Jyonsong” with relatively short O sounds and the “ng” rather like in French. Sorry I don’t do IPA or whatever it’s called.
There are lots of other possible combinations, it wouldn’t be possible to cover them all here. I hope this helps.
If you simply transcribe the English into katakana, then read it back, instant Japanized English (Ingirisu).
Putting it into katakana forces you to substitute the nearest Japanese equivalent for English phonemes that don’t exist in Japanese. It also inserts vowels for every consonant, willy-nilly, except for /n/, which is the only standalone consonant.
This is, for example, how Arrow got mirakuru out of “miracle.”
In other words, the vowel /u/ is devoiced in the environment of an unvoiced consonant. Devoiced means with the vocal cords turned off, i.e. whispered. The same is usually true of /i/ with unvoiced consonants.
And T becomes TO, not TU because there is no “tu” letter in Japanese.
Basically the Japanese character set is a grid of 5x10 grid - 50 letters that represent all possible combinations of 5 vowels and 9 consonants, plus the 5 vowels by themselves. I.e. there are “a, i, u, e, o”, then “ka, ki, ku, ke, ko”, etc. But there are a few irregularities and modifiers - e.g. for the “t” sounds we have “ta, chi, tsu, te, to”.
The issue you describe also shows up in the middle of words when you have two consonant sounds placed together. A native Japanese speaker will put vowel sounds in between those consonant sounds, consistent with their katakana spelling. So:
“sofuto kurimu” ( = soft cream, i.e. soft-serve ice cream, a popular treat in Japan; there is no “tu” in katakana, so “to,” rhyming with “oh”, is what gets used instead)
“kurisumasu” ( = Christmas)
“Makudonarudo” ( = McDonald’s; there is no “du” in katakana, so “do,” rhyming with “oh”, is what gets used instead)
When Japanese people speak English, their tendency to put a vowel sound in between just about every pair of consonant sounds seems to be a hard one to overcome; it’s a significant part of the Japanese “accent.”
Letters are not sounds, they’re little pictures. The word for the sounds is phonemes.
Every language’s sound is built of syllables. What happens to represent one syllable per symbol in Japanese (and it’s not biunivocal) is in fact the writing.
English is possibly the European language in which the concept of syllable is weakest. Other languages have rules (sometimes written, sometimes unwritten) about not splitting syllables at the end of a line, not splitting syllables when shortening a word, spelling rules which depend on the whole syllable (not on the individual phoneme, for these languages thinking it’s on the phoneme is one of the biggest causes of bad spelling)…
Depending on which is the language you’re starting from and its own phonetic/syllabic structure, the adaptation will be different. Languages with a vowel/consonent ratio close to that of Japanese will be easier; which sounds get substituted by a different-but-close one will vary. For example, words from Italian or from any of the languages of Spain which happen to end in a consonant other than n will often get an /i/ added at the end; the two Spanish “r” sounds don’t exist in Spanish but Japanese has a similar sound which gets used instead.
That’s good to know. Mattu (or Mattsu, or Mattchu) sounds okay. Matee, on the other hand could get annoying, since an ee sound is often added at the end of a name when talking to a small child. Also, I actually find the IPA stuff to be LESS helpful since I don’t know it either, and have to look it up every time which usually diving into the jargon-riddled rabbit hole of wikipedia.
Yes. And those characters always have the same sound regardless of what comes next. So, instead of sage, they’d say saw-gay. This seems really odd when you see adjacent vowels and hear each vowel sound being pronounced.
Sandhi (phonetic substitutions) in Japanese syllables:
*di > ji
*du > zu
*hu > fu
*si > shi
*ti > chi
*tu > tsu
*zi > ji
You can’t get the first syllable in each pair; if you try, you wind up with the second one.
This explains the oddity of the manga title Fruits Basket (instead of the expected *Fruit Basket). The katakana version of “fruit” was written with tu, which is actually tsu: If you write “furutu,” what you get is “furutsu.” It also explains why azuki beans used to be called aduki or adzuki.
To be clear, that shortening happens as a matter of convenience for frequently-used borrowed words (which often then take on a life of their own, like anime). In most cases the longer version will also be understood.
For example, my homestay mother said one day (in Japanese) that she was going to the “soopah”, which word I repeated with a question in my voice, since I didn’t recognize the word, so she said “soopah mahketto” which I grasped as “supermarket.” In that case at least “supermarket” had become familiar in Japanese before being shortened to “super” for convenience.
Which brings to mind “konbini” for convenience store, but that’s another discussion.
A lot of those in the first column do exist in modern Japanese, usually through a smaller katakana character. For example, “ti” is sometimes represented as “chi,” but other times it is “te” plus a small “i.” Party is usually パーティー or paat(e)[sub]ii[/sub]. Finland is f(u)[sub]i[/sub]nrando. Sometimes “V” sounds are represented with an altered by dakuten “U” though that’s fairly uncommon, “B” sounds are normally used.
One of these is the reason I think Hepburn (or really the modifications of it) is better than kunrei-shiki or similar.