eli5: Why do certain languages that don’t use the Roman alphabet have silent letters when they are transliterated? The most commonly used one would probably be “tsunami”

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eli5: Why do certain languages that don’t use the Roman alphabet have silent letters when they are transliterated? The most commonly used one would probably be “tsunami”

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6 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

The “t” in “tsunami” is intended to be pronounced in English, but not all English speakers pronounce it. I’ve always pronounced it, myself.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because sounds from those languages are just approximated using Roman lettering. For example, in Japanese the standard Romanization of the “T” characters are “ta”, “chi’, “tsu”, “te”, “to”, but other standards use “ta”, “ti”, “tu”, “te”, “to” for the same. But because the pronunciation of the consonant “T” isn’t the same between the two languages, there’s differences in standards between more accurately representing pronunciations vs. more accurately mapping to which character it’s representing. It’s why Romanizations of some languages like Chinese don’t look at all like they’re pronounced.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Tsunami is Japanese and the “t” is pronounced with the “s” when said properly. The Japanese language is based on syllables mainly, rather than specific letters – in Japanese hiragana, tsunami is “tsu”-“na”-“mi”.

The t and the s in “tsu” make a sound clashing the t and s together – kind of sounds like a cymbal.

Anonymous 0 Comments

In your particular example, the word tsunami is Japanese in origin. Japanese uses a different writing system. So, to make it easier on English speakers, we transliterate using the Roman alphabet as you’ve surmised. In Japanese, ‘tsu’ is a single character, which is pronounced as it sounds. But, in Japanese, speakers often omit the hard t from the beginning of words that start with tsu. So why not transliterate it as ‘su’? Simply because there are rules for how words get changed to the Roman alphabet and they need to be consistent, and because you technically can pronounce the hard t in Japanese and some speakers do. Japanese words don’t always translate exactly to how a word might be said in English, so you still have to know a few rules like this. (‘Sensei’ is usually pronounced sen-Sehh, not sen-say, for example).

Anonymous 0 Comments

Other languages make heavy use of sounds that are not familiar to English speakers. As such, there’s no clear way to indicate them in the English alphabet (that is to say, the Latin alphabet as interpreted by a native English speaker). When transliterating, the typical approach is to assign these sounds to letters or letter clusters that don’t usually appear in English, like “ts” or “q” without a “u” (“x” is particularly popular for this).

So the “t” in “tsunami” is not really silent. It indicates a distinction that would be obvious to a native Japanese speaker but is hard for native English speakers to hear. Substituting a simple ‘s’ sound works well enough, and it’s precisely these kinds of substitutions that give foreign speakers of a language an accent. It’s extraordinarily difficult to speak a new language without an accent, so there’s no shame in it.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Whenever Latin script is used to represent a spoken language — any language — the people who formalize the spelling have to decide which letters correspond to which sounds. Latin script never has a perfect set of letters to represent the sounds of any language — not even Latin — so they have to make some tough choices.

Usually, any odd spelling you see is an attempt to represent a real feature of the spoken language in question. It might be an unfamiliar feature that doesn’t exist in your language, but it’s there.

Some examples: the “ts” in “tsunami” really does sound like that in Japanese, it’s an [affricate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affricate). English has words that start with affricates (like “jar” and “chair”), but we don’t do “ts” at the start of words, so when an English speaker pronounces “tsunami”, it usually sounds like “sunami”. But the problem is with the English speaker, the Latin spelling ( [Hepburn Romanization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese) ) correctly describes the sound.

The Russian word “tsar” is another example of this same sound in the same place, also awkward for English speakers to pronounce. Russian, like many languages, has had several different [Romanization systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Russian), in the GOST system this word is written “czar”.

The Hawaiian word “Hawai’i” is usually pronounced by English speakers as “Ha-why”, so why does it have an extra extra “silent i”? And what’s with the random apostrophe? The apostrophe represents a glottal stop (the sound in the middle of “uh-oh”, which English speakers use but don’t consider a letter), and the second “i” is pronounced. This word is pronounced close to “Huh-VAI-ee” . Once again, the spelling does describe the sounds, in a way that’s different from what English speakers expect.

Point is that *all* languages have to make this awkward fit between their sounds and the letters in Latin. Even English! English wasn’t originally written in Latin (it wasn’t originally written at all). So consider the English words “crook”, “croak”, and “crock”. Is the ‘o’ in “crook” silent? How about the ‘a’ in “croak” or the ‘c’ in “crock”? No. English has a ridiculous number of different vowel sounds, far more than the Latin letters A,E,I,O,U can accommodate, so we use extra letters to distinguish between these different vowel sounds.