Hello everyone, I’ve been (leisurely) learning japanese for the past year and a half. Please feel free to jump to the tl/dr section below if you just want to see how my surname is so that you can tell me how it is pronounced.
I’m definitely at the point now where my japanese is good enough that I can hold a simple basic conversation with a japanese person and in fact I’ve finally had the pleasure of doing it.
One problem arised when one of these people asked me for my name and, since it is often mistaken even by my fellow countrymen, my surname was hard for them to understand.
I went to try and write it in katakana but quickly realized that I haven’t really thought about how to do it before; my surname ends with “zutti” and it’s italian so the double t sound is quite strong, just like the word spaghetti.
I saw that spaghetti itself is written as スパゲッティ which is what makes the most sense to me but I’ve often seen the “ti” sound being transcribed with チ so in the end it could be something like ズッチ instead of ズッティ. What would be the most “common” way to transcribe it? Would japanese people have difficulty pronouncing it like ズッティ, considering they already have the word スパゲッティ?
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TL/DR: my surname is italian ends with “zutti”; would you transcribe it as ズッチ or ズッティ?
2 comments
find someone with your name on wikipedia
then switch to the japanese version
To answer your question, I looked up some Italian surnames in Japanese wiki. Looks like they usually use ッチ for -cci endings and ッティ for -tti.