Say, for example, the voiced palato-alveolar frictave ⟨ʒ⟩, which annoyingly sits between し and じ. There’s also the voiced uvular fricative ⟨ʁ⟩. I don’t think that sound is easily replicable because there are no trills in Japanese nor, I think, have JP speakers adopted any word containing the sound. Feel free to give me examples of what katakana terms tackle sounds that otherwise don’t fit well into Japanese phonology.
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5 comments
Pretty much every loan word from another language is turned into Katakana without the exact sounds.
Every English word that ends in /ər/ is changed to /aa/. e.g. Super -> スーパー
All approximants (english R and L) are changed to just /r/. Trolley -> トロリー
For the /ʒ/ sound it would probably turn into じ, but in the past there has also been a づ which might have a similar sound. I’m not super familiar with either of the sounds you referenced. Might also be a good question for /r/linguistics
>Feel free to give me examples of what katakana terms tackle sounds that otherwise don’t fit well into Japanese phonology.
Death = デス (desu)
All “th” sounds I come across are simply replaced with the “su” sound.
There is a pretty systematic way of writing foreign words in katakana (most of the times). I can give examples,
Radio is ラジオ (rajio)
Team is チーム (chīmu)
Salad is サラダ (sarada)
Lock is ロック (rokku)
Lion is ライオン (raion)
Website is ウェブサイト (don’t know how to romanise this one)
Bench is ベンチ (benchi)
Earphones are イヤホン (iyahon)
Computer is コンピュータ (konpyūta)
Curry is カレー (karē)
<ʒ> is usually ジ. Using English loan words as examples:
Beige —> ベージュ (Bēju)
Vision —> ビジョン (Bijon)
<ʁ> as in the “French R” is usually turned into the “Japanese R”. Some loan words from French:
Pierrot —> ピエロ (Piero)
Roux —> ルー (Rū)
Or using the recently popular anime:
Frieren (German word) /fʁi:ʁɐn/ —> フリーレン (Furīren)
To add to the others’ answers, while approximation is the general tendency in everyday usage, there have been some alternative methods for a more precise transcription that are not really used nowadays. For example allophones can be differentiated further by adding a 半濁点 *> ラ゚* for /la/ instead of /ra/, or カ゚ for /ŋa/ instead of /ga/. These aren’t really different from commonly used additions like ヴ or ファ、they just never really got popular.