Quote:
Originally Posted by sarasi
I'm also wondering why you wanted to use a "p" sound to transcribe "coffee"? コピー is "copy", as you might expect.
For new words coming into Japanese from English, there tends to be more standardisation, but for words that have already come into Japanese, various ways of katakana-ising them were used. Sometimes the katakana seem more based on the English spelling, sometimes more on the pronunciation. Sometimes it seems like the person who decided on the katakana didn't know how to pronounce the English word at all. As above, not all words in katakana came from English- there are plenty from Portuguese, Dutch and German as well (アレルギー is one that came from German, that's why it sounds so different from the English "allergy").
Really for common 外来語 (words that have come into Japanese from other languages), you have to learn them individually, just like you do with other Japanese words, and not assume they all follow the same pattern.
|
I wondered at first whether OP is Korean, because they don't have an "f" sound, and they say "coffee" as something like コッピー.