rules of thumb

Once we have decided what word or words we are going to katakanize, we could apply the rules below. These rules are an attempt of mine to sketch a procedure to automate the katakanization of English words; I am giving a shot to use them to write a katakanizer… who knows whether I’ll finish it, since it is just for fun. Hence, this page will be a work in progress for a looong time. 😊

1. words of common use – learn the standard katakanization of common English words
2. the letter ‘k’ – map all instances of ‘c’ and ‘ch’ that sound as ‘k’ into ‘k’s
3. the British accent – map ‘vowel + r’ endings, and the ar/ur/or combinations
4. the letter ‘c’ – map ‘ce/ci’ into ‘se/si’ and deal with ‘ch’s that sound ‘sh’
5. the silent ‘e’:
6. vowel mapping

Let’s see them in a bit of detail

Words of common use

We start by looking at how the Japanese katakanized a few movie and song titles. We have two goals with this exercise. The first goal is to get our feet wet, going over katakanization cases that are already ‘solved’. Here we go:

Our second goal of going over these already-katakanized samples is to reuse the katakanization of words of common use, like ‘I’, or ‘the’, or ‘what’, so we can have a warm start for katakanizations of our own. An ‘in-progress’ list is:

Subject Pronouns

Possessive Pronouns

Object Pronouns

location

Interrogative pronouns and adverbs

To be – present

To be – future

common abbreviations

other

The idea is not to have to worry about how to katakanize this set of words, so we could focus instead on katakanizing only nouns, verbs and adjectives. Of course, there are many more of such words, and the more we know, the better our chances of dealing with a katakana phrase that has them.

The katakanas of some of these words are straighforward, like ‘mai’ for ‘my’, or ‘ofu’ for ‘of’, but some are unexpected, like ‘howatto’ for ‘what’, or ‘za’ for ‘the’. There are many empty slots that we could fill in in the future, when we find them in a movie or song title but, for now, these suffice as a starting point to katakanize the following quotes:

the letter ‘k’

Here are some rules of thumb of cases in which we can map letters to the ‘k’ sound. In the following table, ‘v’ stands for ‘vowel’:

And here are some combinations in which ‘ch’ sometimes sounds ‘k’:

These rules, and the rules in other sections, only apply when the combination of characters are in the same syllable, and often don’t apply when the English word was borrowed from another language. For example, in the word ‘facade’ from the French ‘façade’, the ‘ca’ does not sound ‘ka’ but ‘sa’.

Let’s apply these transformations to our quotes:

the British accent

When we looked up the katakanas of common words, we found that ‘a’ is ‘a’, as in ant, and not ‘ei’ as in ‘pane’. Likewise, the katakana of ‘are’ is ‘aa’, instead of ‘aru’. This happens because these katakanas are transliterations of British English, not American.

In 1868, when the Meiji restoration began and Japan started to modernize itself, the British Empire was the world’s superpower. The United States influence grew after the Second World War, in 1945. Hence, the influence of English in the Japanese language was mostly British for almost a century, during which many common English words were katakanized for good; the more recent American English influence is present in new words, but the old British English words remain in the majority of words, so we need to reflect it when we katakanize English.

This is some basic handling of the British ‘r’:

mootaru

Thus our quotes change as so:

Some exceptions: the conjunction ‘or’ sounds ‘oa’ (オア)

the letter ‘c’

We already saw that in many cases the ‘c’ sounds ‘k’; we’ll repeat them here for completeness. However, in English, ‘c[e/i]’ is always ‘s[e/i]’, but Japanese doesn’t have the ‘si’ sound so ‘ci’ is usually mapped to ‘shi’

Most simple combinations of ‘c’, like v + c, c[a/o/u], and c[r/l][a/o/u], map the ‘c’ to a ‘k’, so we already dealt with these. However, other combinations can map ‘c’ to ‘s’, ‘ch’, or ‘sh’.

As usual, when the word is katakanaized from a language other than English, the rule may not apply. Some examples:

Unfortunately, our quotes don’t have an instance that is affected by the above observations about the ‘c’:

I have reviewed up to here. I’ll up more when I organize it 😊 👍