I recently discovered that Beverly Hills in Japanese is ビバリーヒルズ [bibarii hiruzu] whereas I would have expected it to be ベバリーヒルズ [bebarii hiruzu] or べヴァリーヒルズ [bevarii hiruzu]. Makes me chuckle because to me it sounds more like Bieberly Hills or Beaverly Hills.
Another word like this I found recently was ビーフシチュー [biifu shichuu] for “beef stew”. I would have expected “stew” to be スツー [sutsuu] or スチュー [suchuu], or most accurately ステゥー [sutsuu]. But I realize a lot of loanwords are based on UK pronunciations, and that complex combinations like テゥ are generally avoided, even though they’re technically possible. I just never would have guessed “stew” would be realized as シチュー.
Another example is フムス for “hummus”. It makes sense, but I think I would have expected ハムス [hamusu] or ハマス [hamasu].
Just for fun, what are some other katakana loanwords you’ve come across that don’t seem to match up with how you’d expect them to be phonetically transliterated?
16 comments
スマホ (sumaho) for smartphone is one that stuck out for me
Yea the fu/hu sound is an odd one that trips me up often. I guess because the “fu” is supposed to be pronounced inbetween an f and h sound, it works, but coming from english i am always leaning toward hard f or hard h sound.
One that recently bothered me was チーム. Why is it chiimu?? Why not tiimu??
there are literally 100’s of these… I actually blame some of them on my getting worse results in exams than I should have got….
AND I wasnt told at first that some of them arent from english… so when I was first seeing ARUBAITO for example, I had literally no idea what I was looking at…. (actually ARUBAITO sounds nothing ike ARBEIT lol)
(rant over lol)
I love/hate the way ストライキ is specifically for labour strikes. Also I am amused/confused by セーター.
honestly for me Los Angeles being ロサンゼルス and not ロサンゼレス still gets me …
I will never forgive whoever put the ル in カリフォルニア. It should be カリフォーニア. More accurate and so much easier to say.
I imagine フムス is taken directly from Arabic, where the u sounds like Japanese u, not as pronounced in English. A fair number of katakana words don’t actually come from English (such as レストラン from French, ラーメン from modern Chinese or パン from Portuguese), although the others you mentioned obviously do.
オーストラリア meaning australia アーストラリア makes more sense
Are there any katakana loan words that aren’t English-centic? Why are the loan worlds catering, for lack of a better word, to English? Why not Spanish or French or German or Korean or Russian? Or are there also loan words from those languages, but I haven’t been exposed to them because I’m an English speaker and my training material is taking this into account?
Look up “whistle”
ウイルス took me some time to get used to
White is Hwite. I just can’t with Japanese sometimes.
Slightly different issue, but I found it quite funny when I saw シュークリーム in a book. I assumed it meant “shoe cream” (i.e. polish) but decided that that didn’t make sense in the context, so I looked it up and it turned out it was actually “choux cream”, i.e. a cream puff (choux pastry with cream).
English words where ‘mm’ show up always trip me up. Like シンメトリー for symmetry and ジレンマ for dilemma. Especially dilemma, because ジ、レン、マ all sound like they have possible kanji.
I will never understand how “white” became ホワイト
That’s an interesting observation. When I learned German, I built an intuition about noun gender based on the loan words and their gender in the language of origin. There are patterns in every language like this. I’m sure there is some logic to this about how these words come to be loaned into Japanese.