I don’t dispute what you are saying, but earlier you drew a distinction between “using foreign words to refer to foreign places” and “keeping the foreign pronunciation of words that the speaker knows to be foreign in origin.”
From what you are saying, it’s pretty clearly that the word “Japan” is foreign in origin.
I checked on dictionary.com and it says that “Jerusalem” is originally from Hebrew. So why not pronounce it “Yerushalayim”?
Similarly, it seems that “Paris” comes from French. So why don’t English speakers say “pah-ree”?
Here’s a wild guess: James Clavell’s Shogun was published in 1975 and became a huge besteller in the US. Could that have contributed the word to general usage? I have used tsunami for a long time; I don’t recall if the word was in the book, but the book had a big impact on me at the time, and I certainly could have gotten the word from the book.
What about maremoto?, I know the RAE gives different definitions, (and tsunami being the product,of a maremoto). But here they’ve been used as synonims since I can remember.
What I learned, back in the 60’s and 70’s - “Tidal Wave” referred to those giant waves caused typically by earthquakes. The typical example quoted was the waves generated (IIRC) by the big Alaska earthquake of the time, but somewhere there is old newsreel footage of a 15-foot wave crashing through the palm trees and into a bunch of huts (Hawaii?). Interestingly, this is fostering the misconception that a tsunami is a vertical wave, when as seen after “the big one”, it is more often a smooth slosh that just keeps coming.
The same discussion at school typically said as mentioned above, that “tidal wave” is a misleading name, and the closest to an accurate name was the Japanese word tsunami, which typically and more accurately means an earthquake-generated wave. OTOH, I have never heard of a tidal bore (like Bay of Fundy) referred to as a tidal “wave”, either. Tidal Wave meant Tsunami, it just could be misleading.
it seems like during the big wave of 2006 there was a determined effort by the media and scientists to use the word “tsunami” rather than “tidal wave” thus reinforcing the correct terminology.
“Tidal Wave” was the name of a roller coaster at the Great America amusement park in Gurnee, Illinois outside Chicago. So when our science teachers told us that tsunami was the proper name for what was commonly known as a “tidal wave”, we daydreamed about being at Great America.
