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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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.
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