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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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.
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