What’s the deal with チ and ティ?

9 comments

1. Pronunciation isn’t uniform across hundreds of millions of people, it changes over time, and no one person or group is an authority that gets to say how everything is pronounced or spelled. There’s alternate versions of spellings and pronunciation in all languages. Some are more common than others, and dictionaries try to keep up but can’t always. Some pronunciations or spellings are regional or generational, some are not. I hear and read チーム way more than ティーム. Heck my IME doesn’t even autocomplete the latter at all. But it’s in the dictionary because it’s occasionally used that way. This is why dictionaries aren’t actionable, they’re descriptive not prescriptive. For how to use words you need sentence example sites like weblio.

2. 1. the ィ in ティ is always small.
   2. it honestly depends, some use chi, some use ti

3. Haven’t read everything in detail, but the gist is: You can write many words in many different ways in Japanese! There are so many stylistic choices or alternatives, such as writing words in Katakana, even though they are native, the option of words that exist in only-hiragana, half-hiragana-half-kanji, only-kanji forms or where you can choose between more modern versions and more olden ones, like e. g. ラブ vs. the more modern ラヴ (both meaning love).

   Also, I find jisho pretty reliable, tbh, although sometimes the search algorithm is a bit wonky with what results it shows/shows higher on the list (It partially has to do with it looking up words in how you would write japanese using a western keyboard and also their translations).

4. The way words are borrowed into Japanese goes through phases and fads. You can kind of guess at when a word was borrowed into Japanese by the way it’s transcribed.

   Ateji are more likely to be used with older words, like 天婦羅 for *tempura*, from Latin *tempora*, or 背広 *sebiro*, a suit, from English “Saville Row”. (スーツ is the more common term now, by the way.)

   Early katakanisation tries more to follow native Japanese pronunciation and stick to the available kana, whereas more modern katakana will try to stick to the original English pronunciation (or other languages) and will use more variant, non-native katakana to do so.

   Thus you’ll get the older バイオリン, with the “V goes to バ-row” hack, or the more modern ヴァイオリン, with both ヴ for V and the small ァ, which don’t occur with native Japanese words.

   Another example is the リーゼント hairstyle, the pompadour style favoured by yankiis and bosozoku, which is named after Regent Street in London, while the Regent Hotel is transcribed as リージェント.

   The word “team” is an older introduced word, thus it’s commonly written as チーム, but more modern, and maybe English-savvy, Japanese may prefer to use ティーム.

   Also, I suspect there may be a bias from English-speakers, with our fat dictionaries showing the “correct” spelling of a word and our childhood fascination with spelling bee competitions, to say that almost every word has one singular correct spelling, but which is not so strongly adhered to with katakanisation of borrowed words. For example, ウインナー (wiener sausage) may be also seen transcribed as ウィンナー, with a small ィ, or ウインナ, without the ー, or even as ウィンナ, carrying both variations. There’s no one definitive spelling, per se.

5. The ‘hell’ going on with チ and ティ is that older speakers growing up in a monolingual Japanese environment were simply unable to pronounce certain sound combinations that foreign languages used, because they were missing from Japanese. This is especially problematic when it comes to transcription since even if some speakers could approximate enough in speech, in writing they were limited to a basic set of syllables that simply did not allow anything out of the ordinary.

   Luckily for them, this already happened during interactions with Chinese, and the solution they came up with then was to take the kana that had the desired ‘special sound’ and combine it with another kana to show what vowel it needs to be paired with, which resulted in combinations like ちょう、しゃ、じゅう etc. This was of course a hot mess; in the beginning the helper kana were the same size as the base, and they weren’t always from the Y set, and Japanese was also going through a complicated monophtonigasion period at the time, coupled with other phonetic shifts. And then arrived the Europeans.

   They tried their best to approximate using the rules they came up with centuries ago but people were going abroad much more frequently now, and could slowly pick up on the differences that others could not, so many alternative methods were born, and are still to this day, striving to get as accurate as possible. The ティ combination is a relatively recent one following the same rule: take the consonant from the first kana and combine it with the vowel from the smaller one—and it is indeed a tad bit closer to the actual pronunciation (of course, depending on the dialect) than the old チ was, but you cannot really apply new rules retroactively, people get used to things and conservativism kicks in. You could, for instance, respell the word for coffee as カフィ now, but very few people would ditch コーヒー for it, it’s been in use for far too long.

   Your examples are on the boundary where both newer and older methods are in use, depending on the age (and provenience, and education, and linguistic skills, etc. etc.) of the person, and there really are no hard rules on which one is correct and which is not.

   Edit: typos & clarification

6. >I’ve been doing that mostly by myself using a guide by Tae Kim.

   Bit of an aside, but another good resource to check out (if you haven’t already) is https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLg9uYxuZf8x_A-vcqqyOFZu06WlhnypWj

7. As people have mentioned, there’s not a lot of hard and fast rules. Though FWIW, I have seen “チーム” way way more often than “ティーム”

8. チ　represents a native Japanese sound. ティ　represents a sound that has been introduced into Japanese and is somewhat unnatural for native speakers – especially the older ones. In the countryside it’s not uncommon for older people to refer to Disney Land as デズニー　instead of ディズニー　because with native Japanese posturing it’s not easy to make the ディ　sound.

9. the deal with チ and ティ is chi and Ti.