eli5: how does romaji work with english names?

Question

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?

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Answer 1

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.