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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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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