There seems to be a lot of Japanese speakers on this board, so I want to ask about something thats bothered me for a long time.
Japanese has a lot of four syllable words, but apparently, the third syllable is often elided, e.g. the port of Yokasuka is pronounced ya-KOO-ska, the WWII rifle was the arisaka, pronounced a-RISK-a. My favorite was the P.M. back in the '80’s named Takeshita. The TV news people went crazy over this one until they decided on ta-KESH-ta.
So what is it? Is this a common practice in spoken Japanese, or are Americans trying to make these words easier to say?
Thanx
There are better speakers of Japanese on this board than me who will be posting soon, but I will say that that is the Japanese way of pronouncing those words, not an Americanization. Many times syllables starting with “s” or “sh” are kind of swallowed, so that something like the common words “desu” is pronounced “dess,” and its past tense, “deshita” is pronounced “deshta.” The suffix
“-shita” is appended to verbs to show the past tense, and I have never heard the “i” pronounced. The word “understood” is “wakarimashita,” pronounced “wakarimashta,” and so forth.
Nihonjin? Honto desu ka?
It’s not exactly correct to say that the “shi” is dropped. It’s pronounced, but it’s very short and unstressed. In English, the rules of pronunciation would require saying the “shi”, but this pronunciation would be more accurately represented in (romaji) Japanese by “shii”.