The other day I bought a t-shirt with Spider-Man and Venom on it and their names are written in katakana with a word in kanji that I don’t recognise in the middle. I hadn’t started katakana with my Japanese tutor yet, but after my lesson today, I looked at the shirt and figured out what it said.
However, I got confused as to why they used ヴエ instead of べ because I play a Japanese rhythm game where one of the songs is also called Venom, and they use ベノム in the Japanese version and in the title of the original song (the song in my game is a cover). Can anyone help me understand why they didn’t just use べ? Is there some nuance or grammar I’m missing?
4 comments
Traditionally the sound of ‘v’ has always simply been transliterated as a ‘b’ sound. There is now a way to transliterate the ‘v’ sound and it’s by putting a diacritic mark on ウ. You will still see the ‘b’-sound used just because it’s just a spelling that people already know or a word that has become part of the language as a loanword. The difference between the song you sang is venom is a word that has nothing to do with the movie and most likely a loanword. So it is the correct spelling for *that* word. While the movie is a transliteration of the name of a Spider-Man character.
Are you sure the shirt says ヴエノム and not ヴェノム? (notice the size difference)
va vi vu ve vo = ヴァ ヴィ ヴ ヴェ ヴォ
(see the other answer you got for the rest of the explanation)
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>with a word in kanji that I don’t recognise in the middle.
Not what you were asking but since the question is already answered… just wanted to chime in and guess that the character is probably 対 (or 對 if they wanted to be fancy) and it means “versus”.