– Tomato: *tomahto*
– Water: *wohtah*
– Store: *sutoah*
Is there a reason why that is? Perhaps it’s because of the large British influence in history when all these words came into usage? I’m just guessing here.
I asked a Japanese friend about the difference, “Why are gairaigo in a British accent?” and she said she didn’t notice it before. “Huh, is it though?”
I mentioned examples like “tomato” turned into トマト and not トメイト, or even the alphabet letter “Z” is ゼッド. And she admits she has no idea either and we just laughed about how funny languages evolve.
But now I’m thinking how EASY would it be for Japanese people to learn British accent instead of American accent in schools.
13 comments
British as it sounds now is a relatively recent occurrence. The real answer is that it’s just a coincidence. Loan words are just trying to emulate the best they can with the limited Japanese sound set. They aren’t really emulating any particular accent.
Now as for why they teache general American pronunciation? I think it’s just because the U.S. had more influence over Japan.
because British is more likely to be pronounced as it is written
and the very spelling of words determines
how they will get transliterated into Japanese
Please don’t drag Katakana English with the RP vs American English pronunciation differences.
maybe become sometimes katakana words are based on the spelling, and sometimes based on the pronunciation (which does now always correlate to British vs American accent stuff)
an example: カオス is only based off the way chaos is spelled, but I have never heard any native speaker of English, regardless of country of origin, pronounce it the katakana way
If it sounds british, it’s likely a coincidence resulting from the limited transliteration. Otherwise words like エレベーター and アパート would probably be リフト and フラト.
Store becomes su-to-ah because there’s no /ôr/ sound in Japanese, so it sounds closer to “staw”. British English also *tends* to be a little more uniform with how vowels are pronounced. Can’t explain tomato, but アルバイト and パン aren’t exactly American English either.
The popularity of the American accent likely comes the heavier American influence, with Cmdr. Matthew Perry, post-WW2, media/pop-culture, etc.
People are downvoting this but you’re obviously right. The biggest tell is that in Japanese English is non rhotic, which is not the case in prestige AmE dialects. If you’ve internalized the “foreign syllable ending in R = long vowel” rule for English katakana words you might be surprised when you notice this is not adhered to at all for other European languages.
But as for why they teach American accents in school now, the entire post-War period is the answer I think.
Because British pronunciation is better
All dialects of English have changed over the past hundred years, and a lot of the words were loaned a decently long time ago. Japanese speakers are not subject to the same pressures and have no reason to update their pronunciations after the loan word is established.
For example, ホワイト reflects a word initial /hw/ you hear in a lot of older British and American dialects, but is exceedingly rare to hear nowadays from anyone that isn’t 60+.
On a semi-relevant note, the most likely use of English as a foreign language other than obviously speaking it yourself is to hear foreigners speak it. When they are missing vocabulary, it’s not too uncommon for people somewhat proficient in English (not just native speakers) to inject English words into another language and hope that they’ll be understood.
So I guess at least a side effect is that Japanese students will be prepared to understand both “to-may-to” and “to-mah-to”.
More likely, it’s for historical reasons though, as others have pointed out.
I’m pretty sure that the accent is not what is holding japanese people back from learning english lol
they’re probably learning american english because thats what’s most common, globally.
Which accent katanaka loan words are based on probably depends on who introduced that concept and when. if a british merchant first brought tomatoes to japan in 1660 or something and called it tomato, thats what people would have gone with.
Also the american and british accents only developed their differences over time, so back then probably everyone called it tomahto
I think maybe we overthink things like this. Language is a strange thing. Not just Japanese. At my last job I was making an ID card for a Burmese man. His name was Nyugen, but was pronounced “win”. My head almost exploded. Why spell it like that? We don’t call Japan “Nihon”, which I never really understood why. I think it is safer to accept these things as they are as learners of the language. I struggled with this a lot at the beginning. My American brain would see a loan word and wonder why or how they came up with the pronunciation of a lot of words. In the end I just told myself that’s the way it is. For me, it’s been a lot easier not to worry about it.
Best not to think about it. Let it フライ ✈️
😂
When Japan was forced open by Commodore Perry, many countries flocked in. You have not only English gairaigo words, but also French, German, and even other east Asian languages like Indonesian and, of course, Chinese.
British English is more prevalent in older garaigo words because the English had more influence in Japan than the Americans during the late Bakumatsu and early Meiji periods.
Nowadays, American English is more prevalent in Japan because of the American Occupation and the subsequent MacArthur plan after WW2.