I saw something today written in Katakana and the word fork was written as フォーク
I was wondering why there wouldn’t be a ル in there, but then it reminded me of star or monster (like in Pokémon) and how it’s just スター
I’m just curious if there’s an explanation for this.
3 comments
Do you hear any R sound in the English pronunciation of “fork”?
If you want to do yourself a favor for when you get to more advanced studies in Japanese, you should just convince yourself that katakana versions of other language words (as they aren’t always English) are separate words entirely rather than trying to remember them as the “English” equivalent.
There will be so many words where the Japanese meaning and pronunciation is very different from the English, which can make it confusing to remember it correctly. So in my brain I always need to draw a line and convince myself they are 2 different words rather than the “same”
If that makes any sense xD
It’s just how the word has been loaned into Japanese, and it shows up this way in the dictionary. Though to my ears it would sound strange to add an extra syllable for the r sound, which here is more of a subtle modification of the vowel than an extra syllable. The Japanese r sound isn’t especially soft either.
Though one common exception I can think of is アルバイト from the German “arbeit” (to work). There the r gets its own syllable. But maybe that’s because the German r is harder than the English r.