Your intuition is correct. Tsunami is a loanword from Japanese, where the word is "harbor wave", roughly pronounced Tsunami. However, in English, we don't have the 'tsu' sound Americans can't say the sound well , so we just go with 's' instead.
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Asked 10 years, 4 months ago. Active 6 years, 8 months ago. Viewed 28k times. Improve this question. Ming-Tang Ming-Tang 1 1 gold badge 2 2 silver badges 4 4 bronze badges. When I've studied Japanese, I found the tsu sound to be very difficult for me a native English speaker , particularly when it's the first word of a sentence.
Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Neil Coffey Neil Coffey Well, in principle they can pronounce any sound used by any other language. But it may take weeks of practise even for just one sound! So, whereas before, 'bite' would have been something like 'beetuh', the Great Vowel Shift and the eventual elision of the final 'e' makes its modern pronunciation 'byt' — silent 'e'.
Another process occurs when we borrow words from other languages. The initial consonant sounds in these words are not used in English, at least to start words. English ends words with those clusters, though: 'hats', 'chops'. The initial 'p' in 'psychology' and 'pterodactyl', and other words from Greek has become silent in English.
Some English speakers — not all — simplify the word 'tsunami' by not pronouncing the initial 't', so that it fits in with the phonological rules of English. Joe Devney, linguistic consultant. Often silent letters in English are actually diacritic letters. This means that rather than being pronounced, they change the pronunciation of another syllable. Compare the words 'fin' and 'fine'. The 'e' isn't pronounced, but it changes the pronunciation of the vowel by lengthening it.
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