Confused about “v” sound.

6 comments

1. ウオッカ is ‘uokka’, from the Russian pronunciation with a ‘w’ initial consonant.

   ヴォーカル *is* ‘vookaru’ with a v initial consonant, technically, but because this sound does not exist in Japanese most of the time it will be pronounced ‘bookaru’ with an ‘b’ initial consonant. The v/b distinction exists mostly for phonetic writing of foreign languages, and is often ignored with loan words in everyday usage.

2. Vodka is a Russian word, Водка. In Russian, в is pronounced as /v/, but Russian pronunciation of /v/ often sounds like /w/ to Japanese people. On the other hand, vocal is an English word and clearly pronounced as /v/, therefore it is transliterated as ヴォーカル.

3. Volkswagen and vogel are also pronounced as an F sound and written as フォルクスワーゲン and フォーゲル. Japanese people don’t care or unable to distinguish these sounds as well as L and R. I leave it an original spelling when I am reluctant to spell in Katakana.

4. usually v from Russian (or w from German, which is pronounced /v/) is borrowed as a w or u sound.

   usually v from English is borrowed as b, but it can also be borrowed as ヴ, which is the way to write /vu/ in Japanese. Is it actually a phoneme of Japanese? Probably not in my opinion. Some people can pronounce /v/ but in my experience only when it’s written down in front of them as ヴ, then they make the effort. Some people will see ヴォーカル which is supposed to be /vo:karu/ and just pronounce it as /bo:karu/ (ボーカル).

   There’s also something about the age of a loanword – older ones use different conventions or sound correspondences, while newer ones are more uniform. So it’s quite possible that it was actually just that vodka is an older loanword and it was that 19th century/early 20th c. Japanese people heard v as their w sound.

5. ヴ is rare in general usage, but much less rare in manga, anime, and video games (especially ones that use faux-German name schemes).

   Japanese will write things like *violin* or *Vocaloid* with a B in katakana because the distinction between V and B doesn’t matter much to them.

   Also, Japanese defaults to the native pronunciation of most loanwords, with that language not necessarily being English. In the case of *vodka*, which is Russian, the katakana pronunciation of *uokka* reflects a best-standard attempt at copying that.

6. write as `ウォ`, but both are correct for pronouncication.