Strange conceptions?
Tsunami doesn’t start with a T sound, It’s just a strange artifact of the romanization of the Japanese sounds. It’s not exactly a S sound either. The sound it’s supposed to be just doesn’t have an english equivalent at all, so they made up something close-ish but it does a poor job of communicating that.
The one Japanese mis-pronunciation that bothers me is that Tokyo only has two Syllables, To-Kyo, not To-Ky-O like almost all western people pronounce it as. Kyoto has the same problem, It’s Kyo-to, not Ky-O-To.
jbrains@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
Yes. That’s humor.
Yes, and English speakers have an established collective inconsistency regarding whether to pronounce loanwords anywhere on the spectrum from (somewhat) faithfully to the original language to transcribed to entirely reinterpreted with English pronouciation norms. To declare that the “t” in that word is silent overstates the situation. At most, it’s optional.
I pronounce those cities as two syllables, although it doesn’t bother me when others don’t. I also pronounce “Mangione” as three, even though I don’t overdo it on the Italian vowels.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
Living on the west coast of Canada, where we talk about Tsunamis fairly regularly, I’ve never heard anyone add a T sound to Tsunami at the start. Only Sue-Nah-Me
jbrains@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
How strange. I never pronounced it any other way. I don’t think of it as a regionalism. I grew up near Toronto.