That's a good point. Latin letters map to a big number of IPA sounds. I think this is specially true with consonants. Vowels, however, might be the same. For example, Spanish has five vowels (a, e, i, o, u in IPA). Japanese also has five IPA vowels and only the "u" is different in IPA

I don't know IPA, but Japanese e and Spanish e are also different. Spanish e is like English A in "ace", Japanese e is closer to English "eh".

That's the difference between [e] and [ɛ] in IPA (in IPA, with "narrow" phonetic transcription, you enclose the sounds in brackets). In American English, "ace" is [eɪs] and "mess" is [mɛs]. But I don't think that's right; I'm pretty sure both the Japanese e and Spanish e sound exactly the same.

And if you pronounced [e] and [ɛ] to native speakers of either Spanish or Japanese, they most likely wouldn't be able to differentiate the two sounds consistently without having had training. I know that in Spanish, realization of e can be either vowel depending on the speaker and context; they might pronounce "tierra" as [tjɛra] and "mesa" as [mesa].

>they most likely wouldn't be able to differentiate the two sounds consistently without having had training

I learn English since I was pretty young, I believe I'm quite fluent (I mostly use English for work, I lived for two years in an English speaking country, I read books in English, etc), and I still have problems distinguishing some English vowels. I think sound acquisition is one of the hardest things to learn for a non-native speaker.

Japanese e would only ever be [ɛ]. The constructs to produce an [e] sound would be transliterated as "ei" (the quoted are just letters, not meant to be IPA).

So, while I disagree that they sound "exactly the same", I do agree that in most cases the differences between [e] and [ɛ] wouldn't be enough to cause confusion between speakers of either language.

>Japanese e would only ever be [ɛ]

What's your source for this? Wikipedia says "/e, o/ are mid [e̞, o̞]" [1]

>The mid front unrounded vowel is a type of vowel sound that is used in some spoken languages. There is no dedicated symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the exact mid front unrounded vowel between close-mid [e] and open-mid [ɛ], but it is normally written ⟨e⟩.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology?wprov=sfla1

Japanese vowels not only don't seem to be consistent across diferent mora, they actually seem to be some sort of combination of vowel + pitch.

> And if you pronounced [e] and [ɛ] to native speakers of either Spanish or Japanese, they most likely wouldn't be able to differentiate the two sounds consistently without having had training.

I am a Spanish guy living in Japan, so I can confirm it. I didn't have any idea that the two sounds are supposed to be different because to me they sound exactly the same.

Fun fact: Japanese people are surprised that we have the same five vowels (although the U is a bit different), and that we can get the correct pronunciation very easily.

As a speaker of Scandinavian languages, literally none of the vowels in English map correctly to how we pronounce the same vowels. Several of the English vowels are diphthongs, which we spell out with double vowels. Like eng. "i" is our "ai", eng. "a" is our "ei" - "a bridge" is translated to "ei bro", where the articles are pronounced exactly the same. Or the Scottish word for home, "hame", is pronounced exactly like we say the same word, "heim".

Scotland and Ireland were known to recieve social visits from scandinavians. So there could be a reason behind that.

To add to the confusion, in English people might pronounce the article "a" as "ei" (like when reciting "ABC") or "uh" (like the start of "under"). I think most Americans do the latter. I do, at least.

English vowels are weird compared to most continental European languages, to be fair.

I'm a native Greek speaker and to my ears all European languages' vowels are weird with the exception of Spanish, which is completely normal. All those airy sounds: caaat dooog, haaaaouse, taaaaime, etc like a little fish trying to eat a much bigger fish. Let me not start with French, or Italian. Conversely, when I hear myself or another Greek speaker speak English it's like there's a little guillotine in the back of the neck that snaps shut just when a vowel is starting to form: c't, d'g, ta'm, etc.

When learning German it was a revelation that languages could pronounce the same letters in the same way in every word, and therefore you could accurately predict the pronunciation of a word from the spelling.

English does not do this; every word has its own pronunciation, only loosely related to how it is spelled. I think every native English speaker has had the experience of learning a word from reading it, and subsequently mis-pronouncing it because we had to guess at the pronunciation. E.g. I suffered acute embarrassment from mis-pronouncing "Hermione" when talking to a friend about the Potter books. I grew up in the UK but had never met the name before and my guess at pronunciation was entirely reasonable but entirely wrong.

Though I lived for a while in Ireland, and they have it worse. My friend Mebd laughed at me a lot.

Yes, this is also part of the reason why spelling bees are a uniquely American thing - in most other languages it is trivial to predict pronounciation from spelling, so a competition makes no sense.

It's not possible to predict pronunciation from spelling in Russian and there are no spelling bees in russia

Japanese does allow for word initial P in loan words, like Pokémon, so the sound isn’t impossible in Japanese. And pachinko is a Japanese word.

To be fair, Pokémon is abbreviated English, while pachinko is recent from pachin, the onomatopoeia of the loud sound made by the metal balls.

I believe the change into “h” sounds is more applied to words that were traditionally initiated in “p” but morphed over time, in turn also making words starting on “p” an oddity.

This is an interesting phenomenon in language change. There is the question of what sounds are legal in the language (or what sound combinations, and in what contexts), and there's the separate question of which of those possibilities actually exist. For example, syllable-initial "th" is never followed by L in English, but the sound sequence generally doesn't pose difficulties to English speakers, who are already familiar with words like e.g. "three", "shrink", and "sleep".

For a sound to occur in a language, there are two requirements:

The obvious one is that it has to be possible.

But the less-obvious one is that its precursor in the ancestral language must have been possible there. This is what causes strange gaps where it looks like a sound should be possible, and yet it never occurs.

Fair; though I didn't say it's impossible, just unlikely :)

Japanese words starting with "p" still exist, but they tend to be loanwords (pokemon = pocket + monster) or onomatopoeia (pachinko = pachin + ko). Thinking of it now, pokapoka is also a word, but again, an onomatopoeia.

I thought of Pocky, but turns out this is an onomatopoeia too

> It was named after the Japanese onomatopoeic word pokkiri (ポッキリ), which is supposed to resemble the sound of the snack being cracked.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocky

What about パクリ? and ぽっかり?

Those belong to the "onomatopoeic" stratum; you can form e.g. ぱくり・ぱっくり・ぱくぱく・ぱくっと.

Poka-yoke

those are imported words.

There are also many native Japanese onomatopoeiae using an initial p sound. Interestingly enough, if we're at Pokémon, Pikachu's name is influenced by the onomatopoeia /pikapika/ which means to shine, sparkle or flash. But if we look at the original pronounciation of the Japanese verb 光る/hikaru ("to shine"), it would have been pronounced /pikaru/ in Old Japanese, so it looks like the onomatopoeia has re-established itself.

The same is probably true for the Japanese word for flag, 旗/hata - it would have been pronounced /pata/ which is suspiciously reminiscent of the onomatopoeia /patapata/, often used for thin pieces of material flapping in the wind.

The Pikachu name is also partly derived from the pika, a small rabbit-like mammal native to Asia and North America.

The pika is an obscure (yet barely interesting...) rabbit thing with no cultural salience, whose most noted features are its alarm call and lack of visible tail, nor are its names pronounced much like the pika in Pikachu in the languages Japanese has much exchange with. Pikachu is explicitly a rodent (a "mouse" with some squirrel inspirations) designed in the early 90s with none of those features.

This claim seems profoundly unlikely.

There are other subtle rules that language may follow in word formation.

For example, in Japanese, a word like tokatokaino may mutate into tokadokaino due to a phonological effect called Rendaku (it depends on details like if "tokadokaino" is a compound word made of "toka"+"toka"+"ino")

Is this the reason that we call Toyoda's company by the name Toyota?

So Toyota has a company folklore explanation to do with the number of strokes when written in hiragana being a lucky number, but Japanese linguists were skeptical when the BBC did a piece on it and think it was just a preference for the unvoiced version when the town in which it was founded changed its name to match the company: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8534294.stm