if my name is Victor then the Japanese name would be ヴィクトル but then why does the romaji spelling become Vikutoru instead of Victor?
In: 0
Romanji is one of three phonetic Japanese scripts that adapt the Japanese phonemes into writing. The only difference between it and Hiragana and Katakana is that it uses the Latin alphabet instead of the usual Japanese characters. Your name is being written using Japanese pronunciation rules, so it’s going to look weird, even in Romanji.
Romaji is just another “alphabet” for spelling Japanese, not a way to write English. Vikutoru replicates the Japanese pronunciation, not the English pronunciation. ク is ku, not K. ル is ru, not R.
It’s just like spelling München instead of Munich. The letters may be the same, but they’re being used to represent a different language’s sounds.
Japanese alphabet does not include single consonants exept for N. All others are followed by a vowel. You have KA KI KU KE KO and RA RI RU RE RO but no K or R by itself. And also no L or X at all. So when writting an foreign name or word in romaji, it morphs to the closest sounding possible with the alphabet that they have available.
Ex my name is Alexandra and is spelled A RE KU SA N DO RA , a taxi is TA KU SHI I , knife is NA I FU etc.
Each Japanese character is associated with a single sound, and all but one (“n”) ends in a vowel. The ones that end in -u are often used at the end of foreign syllables where there would be a consonant in the source language, as that -u sound is often dropped in speech even with Japanese words. Since the Japanese language has no way to end a syllable with either -k or -r, they use the characters for “ku” and “ru” instead, but would not pronounce them when saying your name, so it would come out sounding similar to how you would pronounce it in your native language.
It’s a phonetic spelling. They use Roman letters to form the syllables that they actually pronounce, rather than how the word is pronounced by native speakers. In other words, they’re spelling their accent.
Because that’s not what ヴィクトル says. It’s Vikutoru. You can’t write Victor properly in Japanese katakana, it doesn’t have the characters for it. The individual characters you’ve written corrospond to “Vi”, “Ku”, “To” and “Ru”. That is how it would be read by someone looking at those characters.
Also, that’s not how you’d write it anyway. Victor is written as ビクター in Katakana.
It’s like a game of [telephone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers); small mistakes can accumulate as the message travels from person to person.
Furthermore, mistakes caused by small changes or omissions are almost guaranteed to occur due to the fact that English has sounds and sound patterns that aren’t used in Japanese (and therefore letters/characters for those kinds of sounds don’t exist in Japanese).
———-
Imagine playing telephone with a German speaker who doesn’t speak any English.
You see “victor” written down, you know what this word means and how to say it, and you say it out loud.
The German hears it as two syllables, like VIK-TOR, and writes down as “viktor” because those are the letters they’d use to write out those sounds in German (and they wouldn’t know the English spelling to fix the little c/k mistake).
In this game of telephone “victor” became “viktor” because the English spelling rules were unknown to the German person.
————————
Now imagine playing telephone with a Japanese speaker who doesn’t speak any English, and a German speaker who doesn’t speak any English.
When the first person who speaks/writes Japanese hears the word “victor” they hear sounds and sound combinations that the Japanese language doesn’t have letters/characters for… so they simply try to make do with the letters for sounds they do have. Although an English speaker would hear victor as VIK-TOR, the Japanese language doesn’t really allow written syllables to just end in a consonant sound, so they’d separate the syllables differently; VI* and TO pretty much work how Japanese syllables work, but K and R don’t. The default way Japanese handles this kind of thing is to make the K and R into syllables by adding soft U vowel sounds to each consonant. So, instead of VIK-TOR they basically write it out as VI-Ku-TO-Ru. (* There is also the issue that Japanese doesn’t really use V-sounds… so they’re using B-sound characters instead; so the characters are actually more like BIi-Ku-TO-Ru.)
When it gets to the German speaker they can hear the Japanese speaker saying BI-KU-TO-RU, and all of those sounds have letters in German, so they simply write “bikutoru”.
In this game of telephone “victor” became “bikutoru” because the Japanese person doesn’t know how to write or speak all of those sounds they heard from the English speaker, and the German speaker didn’t know that those soft U sounds should have been omitted or that the Japanese speaker was actually trying to make a V sound.
————-
This is essentially what happens with Romanji.
The Latin/Roman alphabet has all the sounds and letters it needs to copy any word or phrase written in Japanese as “Romanji”… but, like the German speaker, it doesn’t know what the word or phrase was *supposed to be* before it was tweaked to be written with Japanese characters.
It’s a transliteration – because Japanese doesn’t have the same sounds and letters as English, your name is approximated in Japanese.
“Victor” would not be said the same in Japanese because it can’t be said. It would be Bikkutoru. My name, David, would be Deebiddo.
The katakana characters for David. デービッド is de-e-bi-ddo, not literally “David”. The characters in Japanese are not the same as English letters.
Japanese has a pretty strict “CV” or “Consonant Vowel” structure. All syllables in Japanese must be exactly one consonant and one vowel*, so if you have a language like English with lost of complicated consonant clusters, in Japanese you have to insert vowels to break them up.
So in your name Victor, you can’t have a “ct” cluster, so add a “u” vowel in between. You can’t have the “r” at the end because “tor” would be CVC. So tack on another “u” at the end. Romaji doesn’t use the letter “c”, so change that to a “k”. Japanese doesn’t naturally have a “v” sound, so change that to a “b”. So you end up with “bikutoru”.
*Japanese does allow syllables that are just a vowel alone, e.g. “imasu”
*Japanese does allow CVC, but only if the last consonant is an “n”, e.g. “donburi”
*The digraph “ts” looks like a consonant cluster, but it is actually one single consonant made in a single motion. It is spelled “ts” because English does not have this sound and this spelling is the closest approximation. The same applies to “sh” and “ch” which are written with two characters in English but actually represent a single sound.
Latest Answers