Japanese Contractions

[Bruce Pennington]

I thought this might be a good place to ask this. I have noticed watching two different shows with Japanese named actors that they don’t say all the syllables.  One was named Mitsubishi, but they pronounced it “Mits’ke”.  The other is Yusuf, but they pronounce it as “Yus’ke.”  Are these contractions?

[eternal_newbie]

Those are unvoiced/voiceless consonants, something which the English language doesn't really have. 

 

https://Japanese.stackexchange.com/a/1122

https://www.quora.com/Is-the-U-silent-in-Japanese

[Bruce Pennington]

Interesting, thanks!

[John C]

10 hours ago, eternal_newbie said:

something which the English language doesn't really have. 

That's because we have our own issues:

There is a "wa" sound at the beginning of the word "one" but no "W". Where did it go? in the word "two", of course, where it isn't voiced! Silent E's, silent P's, Ph's pronounced like F's, and vowels that change sound for no apparent reason (re: the "O" sound in Bomb, Comb, or Tomb).

 

John C.

[eternal_newbie]

13 hours ago, John C said:

That's because we have our own issues:

 

Modern English is a bizarre hodgepodge of French, Germanic and the Old English language. I found this exercise pretty entertaining/enlightening: https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-back-in-time-understand-english

 

For me, everything back to 1300 was more or less readable and comprehensible; 1200 took a bit of re-reading and reading out loud to comprehend, and 1100 was completely illegible.