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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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.
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