A simple little pair of letters, ⟨iu⟩. Mysteriously, it’s all but invisible to English-speaking readers. My evidence for this?
First is the overwhelming preponderance of ⟨ui⟩ in English. 'Cause if you cruise with quick guile and bruise fruit, you get juice. Our brains are programmed to see only ⟨ui⟩.
I first noticed something was off back in 5th-grade history class. We were learning about Queen Liliʻuokalani. The textbook back in those days printed it without the ʻokina symbol. I read in my textbook “Liliuokalani” and heard the teacher pronounce it “Liliokalani.” I looked back at the word in the book and again heard the teacher say “Liliokalani.” Wondering, was I the only one who noticed the discrepancy?
The martial art jiu-jitsu is practically the only familiar word in English with ⟨iu⟩. This invariably gets changed to jujitsu. In fact, that’s correct because the ⟨i⟩ is silent. The former spelling is a relic of an obsolete system of transliterating Japanese. So I think this example helped form the scales over the eyes hiding ⟨iu⟩ from English-speaking readers.
The names Giuliano, Giuliani (Italian equivalent of Julian) suffer greatly at the hands of English speakers. Mario Puzo wrote The Sicilian about the famous brigand Salvatore Giuliano, but insisted on misspelling his name “Guiliano.” That only contributed to the problem. Look how, more often than not, Rudy Giuliani is misspelled as “Guiliani.” Once seen, cannot be unseen. I have to wonder how the name Giuseppe has escaped the same fate. Or… has it?
When Mariupol was in the news, invariably non-Ukrainians spelled and pronounced it either “Maripol” or “Marupol,” but ⟨iu⟩ may as well not exist.
Looking over the names of Inuit tribal groupings, most of them end in ⟨miut⟩: Nunavimmiut, Iglulingmiut, Netsilingmiut.
Iñupiaq groups, in common with Inuit-speaking groups, often have a name ending in “miut,” which means ‘a people of’. One example is the Nunamiut, a generic term for inland Iñupiaq caribou hunters.
Cite: Iñupiat#History
I felt acutely aware of the cognitive dissonance an English-speaking reader might experience seeing all those -miut names at once. The ⟨iu⟩ may then become impossible to ignore. It might, just might, be enough to make the scales fall from their eyes.
