こんにちわ！
While planning for my upcoming trip to Japan, I came across this combination of kana I’ve never seen before. I’m assuming it’s roughly pronounced “VA” (i saw it in the kana for Evangelion — エヴァンゲリオン) but I was under the impression that V sounds are replaced with B’s in Japanese. Would I be incorrect for assuming it would have been エバンゲリオン? Are there other examples of kana like this that you might not find on a typical kana chart?
ありがとうございます。
4 comments
Some people pronounce “ヴァ” and “バ” the same; others do not. It depends on the person writing it down as well which is chosen.
Essentially, as far as foreign segments go that don’t occur in Japanese, it’s arbitrary to what extent they are transcribed and to what extent people pronounce the transcription in the proper way.<ヴァ,ヴィ,ヴ,ヴェ,ヴォ> exist, but they aren’t always opted for, nor always pronounced even when opted for.
one example is Venice, which is normally written ヴェネツィア *venetsia*, but it is also often written ベネチア *benechia*
and even when written as ヴェ many Japanese speakers still pronounce it as ベ
ヴ is like the Japanese equivalent to a “v” sound, which in this case would be pronounced as “vu”, since it originally came from ウ(u). Adding small case vowels changes the ending. Think of it like the きゃ(ki+ya=kya)、きゅ(ki+yu=kyu)、きょ(ki+yo=kyo) combinations. So ヴァ would be pronounced as “va”, as it is a combination of “vu+a”.
That’s just how the makers of the Evangelion series decided to stylize the name. It’ll be pronounced バ by practically all speakers.