alt Hacker News"The council’s recommendation also adopts Hepburn spellings for し, じ and つ as shi, ji, and tsu, compared to the Kunrei spellings of si, zi and tu."
As a Westerner I know very little Japanese but having worked in Japan for a short while I take an interest in the language.
When reading this it occurred to me there might have been more reason for adopting the Hepburn spelling than stated. As as English speaker I've noticed how poorly we pronounce Japanese words and perhaps this change is also intended as a subtle way of letting us know.
English has a long tradition of stealing words from other languages then mangling them almost beyond recognition because we're too lazy to take efforts to pronounce them correctly. To me, this is a form of language arrogance.
Foe example, I've long complained about the adoption in recent decades of the word tsunami into English and then mangling its pronunciation beyond recognition.
I'm old enough to remember when 'tidal wave' was the generally accepted wording for that ocean phenomenon—now we've replaced these perfectly understandable and descriptive English words with tsunami, which to English speakers is both seemingly unpronounceable and conveys no meaningful description in English.
Right, the introduction of the unpronounceable tsunami into English unnecessarily increased the entropy of the language a notch further. Why, for what purpose? Seems to me the only plausible reason is more because of erudite snobbishness than out of any practical utilitarian reason.
That said, I'm not opposed to English stealing words from foreign languages when it makes sense, for example the German zeitgeist is a wonderful expressive replacement for the spirit of the times, similarly translating say gedankenexperiment is straightforward but we don't do so as the word has a rich contextual meaning for physicists both in English and other languages. Thus, it's best left as is.
Back to tsunami. Whenever I hear the word mispronounced by those who ought to know better it just grates badly, the mangled mispronunciation distracts my attention from what's actually being said. So often one hears TV newsreaders including those on the BBC slur the word as 'sooonami' when clearly its English spelling indicates the correct pronunciation. Tsu, つ, sounds like a hissing snake—say it to yourself. Is that not obvious?
Fashion should not be the reason for stealing foreign words but rather because it makes sense to do so. Moreover, we should be respectful of the languages from whence these words came. Perhaps the adoption of the Hepburn spellings is a Japanese hint suggesting that we try a little harder.
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It's an interesting choice to suggest that the switch to Hepburn romanisation was motivated for a desire to better help English speakers pronounce Japanese words when tsunami is your example. The official Kunrei-shiki romanisation for つなみ is 'tunami', and I can promise you that nobody who visits Japan tells their friends and family that they visited Mount Huzi (ふじ). You would have a point if you had chosen something like Mitutoyo, but even then names are usually the exception when it comes to romanisation/anglicisation as official rules are less applicable, cf. Mitsubishi.
Still, something like 'sooonami' is particularly grating even if we ignore the pretentious BBC accent (I have heard tsu-na-mi on BBC shows to be fair). It could be because as you said the onset gets simplified to better fit English phonotactics like with other words: (ph)thalic acid, (p)terodactyl, kr(w)asan (croissant) in American English with a doubly 'wrong' t at the end, (k)nife, (g)nome, sometimes (g)nu, etc, but I don't think this is it. Su-na-mi sounds fine and this is how it's pronounced in Spanish and some other languages too, every language ends up 'mispronouncing' words if it doesn't fit nicely into the existing phonology. I think what bothers me the most about 'sooonami' is the stress inevitably gets placed on the second syllable which becomes 'nah' in non-rhotic accents which just sounds wrong, and in terms of Japanese phonology it's rare to place the stress on the middle syllable, never mind that the mora is wrong and the pitch accent is wrong, but I by no means speak Japanese.
As for why English even uses tsunami in the first place, maybe 'tidal wave' makes sense if that's what you grew up with or you live in a part of the world at risk of tsunamis, but I don't think I made the connection until I was an adult. Are all tides not waves? Tidal bore, tidal flood, storm wave, etc, sure, unusual events relating to the tide or weather, tidal wave fits if we ignore that they're not caused by the tide, but it doesn't seem comparable to me even if tidal wave isn't wrong and is synonymous.
> English has a long tradition of stealing words from other languages then mangling them almost beyond recognition because we're too lazy to take efforts to pronounce them correctly. To me, this is a form of language arrogance.
Other languages do the same to English words. Lots of words have been borrowed and borrowed again across multiple languages changing pronunciation each time.
> Why, for what purpose? Seems to me the only plausible reason is more because of erudite snobbishness than out of any practical utilitarian reason.
Possibly because the term tidal wave is misleading as it has nothing to do with tides?
> for example the German zeitgeist
That is a great word.
> So often one hears TV newsreaders including those on the BBC
The BBC used to be very good at this a long time ago now. I believe they got rid of the unit that provided the guidance on the pronunciation of foreign words.
> Back to tsunami. Whenever I hear the word mispronounced by those who ought to know better it just grates badly, the mangled mispronunciation distracts my attention from what's actually being said. So often one hears TV newsreaders including those on the BBC slur the word as 'sooonami' when clearly its English spelling indicates the correct pronunciation. Tsu, つ, sounds like a hissing snake—say it to yourself. Is that not obvious?
It's because English has no (or very few - I can't think of any) words that begin with the same phoneme.
That's just what happens with loan words. Japanese loaned "Arbeit" (アルバイト) from German and they also pronounce it "wrong".
> English has a long tradition of stealing words from other languages then mangling them almost beyond recognition because we're too lazy to take efforts to pronounce them correctly. To me, this is a form of language arrogance.
First, there is more than one English: British (plus England, Scotland, etc), American, Australian, Indian, etc.
Second, each language has its own way of doing things, and so words would be pronounced according to the rules of the context of the language that is being used. Should the Japanese pronounce "tempura" the way the Portuguese do, given that the Japanese got the idea from them? Or should a Japanese speaker pronounce it "properly" for the Japanese, and a Portuguese speaker properly for that language?
> So often one hears TV newsreaders including those on the BBC slur the word as 'sooonami' when clearly its English spelling indicates the correct pronunciation. Tsu, つ, sounds like a hissing snake—say it to yourself. Is that not obvious?
Welcome to the world of accents.
Also worth considering that the fact that English does not really care about accents (or tones) to convey meaning helps non-native speakers use it. Two ESL people can probably communicate well enough to get messages across. (Probably handy for English being the modern lingua franca.)
> we're too lazy to take efforts to pronounce them correctly
On that part: as anecdotal as it is, as a lifelong native Japanese speaker myself, I can't pronounce random 日本語 appearing in the middle of English sentence without ceasing speech and partially "rebooting" my brain in the Japanese mode. And therefore, I don't really take an American or whoever non-native saying Japanese sooonahrmeey as particularly disrespectful or upsetting.
Some people get really upset when I'd say different languages implement thought processes, speech recognition, and speech pronunciation processes differently - but that's what languages are. So it's what it is.
As for use of tsunami over tidal waves, I'd agree that the latter is perfectly fine. Sprinkling tsunamis everywhere in media do feel a bit too clickbaity.