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.
This is a strange take. In Japanese it’s literally a consonant cluster [ts], which is to say it’s literally a Japanese “t” followed by a Japanese “s”. The Japanese “t” and “s” are not exactly the same as English, but they’re close enough, and English has the same cluster in, say, the plural “mats” of “mat”.
What “tsunami” breaks in English is not really the sound, but instead just the fact that English doesn’t allow [ts] unless it’s preceeded by a vowel.
It’s not at all like the T sound in Japanese followed by the S sound. The normal T sound in Japanese is pronounced by putting your tongue behind your top teeth and flicking your tongue down a bit. Tsu on the other hand starts with your tongue below your top teeth, and your cheeks pulled together a bit.
It’s also nothing like the TS in Mats in english.
“Nothing like” seems to overstate things, at least to me.
Certainly, the sound in Japanese doesn’t sound aspirated the way English speakers do and expect to hear, but in listening to all the recordings at Forvo for this word, an initial “ts” seems like an entirely reasonable and fairly faithful approximation of the Japanese sound.
Granted, I would expect someone who has listened to significant amounts of Japanese to hear differences that an outsider like me wouldn’t notice, and consequently to judge differences as more pronounced than I would. Even with that in mind, “nothing like” seems like quite the exaggeration.
Moreover, and back to the original point, the pronouciation with an initial “ts” in English seems pretty obvious, just as dropping the “t” to conform to typical English phonotactics does. I wouldn’t see any reason to rule either pronunciation choice out.
Where are you getting this information? This “pull your cheeks together a bit” sounds completely out of left field to me.
Strange conceptions?
Yes. That’s humor.
Tsunami doesn’t start with a T sound, It’s just a strange artifact of the romanization of the Japanese sounds.
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 transliterated to entirely reinterpreted with English pronouciation norms. To declare that the “t” in that word is silent (as Ken has done, at least once) 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.
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
