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”
In: 0
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).
Latest Answers