This is a very stupid question but, assuming that in Japanese language almost all foreigner words are written in katakana, why ‘tobacco’ is writen in hiragana? And why the first syllabe is ‘ta’ and not ‘to’? English is not my native language, but I thought that the first syllabe of ‘tobacco’ sounds like ‘to’, not ‘ta’ as in Spanish.
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Borrowed a long time ago, from Portuguese, where the word is ‘tabaco’. Since it was so long ago, like ‘tempura’, it’s not really thought of as a loanword.
But ‘ta’ is actually a better match for the first syllable of ‘tobacco’ in English than ‘to’ is, even if Japanese would normally follow the spelling here. A lot of the time unstressed vowels in English get reduced to the same weak vowel on the end of ‘China’.
EDIT: Oh, and additionally, ‘katakana for loanwords’ is actually super recent relatively, like postwar. In fact in a lot of prewar writing they used katakana where hiragana would be used today.
You’ll see タバコ, たばこ and 煙草.
You can definitely see タバコ used.
Tabako is so Japanese by now you even see it written in kanji: 煙草 (“smoke grass,” more or less)
I’m not sure if this has any relevance but I find it interesting that the word “THE” when used in Japanglish (Japanese/English)
I’ve seen it transcribed either as
ザ ワールド
The World!
And
ジ エンド
The End
Tobacco is formally/historically written as 煙草 but because this is a [jukujikun](https://www.japandict.com/lists/re_inf/gikun), the way this kanji combination is read has nothing to do with the readings of either of the individual characters; it is just idiomatic that the kanji characters for “smoke” and “grass”, when written together, means tobacco and is read as たばこ. So what you’re seeing is just the kana reading of this jukujikun kanji combination, even though this reading is itself a transliteration of “tobacco”.
Nowadays it seems like nobody bothers to write out たばこ using the kanji. There are a lot of words like that. Nobody seems to write out the kanji for wasabi (山葵) or nori (海苔) either; it’s all just written in hiragana nowadays. Both wasabi and nori are also jukujikun. As you can see, the kanji that correspond to these words don’t have pronunciations that correspond to how these two words are read.
Someone already said it comes from Portuguese ‘tabaco’ or whatever. But I’ll argue it’s not ‘to’ in native English pronunciation either. Sure accents are different so it may vary country to country. But I reckon tobacco is pronounced t’backo like a silent vowel. Not pronounced.
Why is the word for part time job バイト？
It’s a horrible addiction and people want to distance themselves from your vice
Tobacco has been in Japan for so long, it actually predates the tradition of using katakana for loanwords. Also, many loan words aren’t spelled or pronounced the same way as they are in english. They tend to hear schwa (the neutral “uh” sound found in unemphasized syllables) as “ah” instead.