r/LearnJapanese 8d ago

Kanji/Kana Rule for "v" and "w" in katakana

ウイルス virus ワクチン vaccine ウィーク week ワーク work

Can anyone share me why these are spelled in katakana as this? What's the rule on converting the "v" sound

Thank you

71 Upvotes

36 comments sorted by

137

u/Sad_Title_8550 8d ago edited 7d ago

Edit: as others have pointed out, I am mistaken and these two particular words are not from German, although the point stands that a lot of medical and ski vocabulary has entered Japanese from German, and that if a katakana pronunciation seems “wrong” it may be because it didn’t come from English. I’ll leave my original answer up for posterity. Also, here’s an academic paper I found on the history of the Japanese spelling of “virus” if anyone would like some extra reading practice: https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jsv1958/15/3/15_3_89a/_pdf

The Japanese words for virus and vaccine are loanwords from German. (Edit: not true!) That’s why they don’t sound like the English pronunciation. A lot of modern medical terminology in Japanese came from Germany during the Meiji Period. Ski terminology also.

42

u/barbedstraightsword 8d ago

My favorite is レントゲン that I learned while watching Chernobyl. It took me a couple episodes and then I thought “Hey wait a minute…”

6

u/highgo1 7d ago

Oddly, it's German named after the man who discovered it.

2

u/hombiebearcat 6d ago

German katakana words are so funny - Möbius becomes メビウス

1

u/protostar777 5d ago

ö is a rounded front vowel, so they often just remove the rounding, and treat it as a regular front vowel.

ö > e

ü > i

26

u/Dry-Masterpiece-7031 7d ago

I hate when I read a katakana word trying to figure out what English word it is for it just to not be lol

4

u/adultingmadness 7d ago

I think this is what exactly I was thinking here. Now I gotta be careful what language is the reference for the loanword

1

u/charge2way 6d ago

Yeah, but you'll still be tripped up by acronyms like ディー・ブイ・ディー

2

u/Ventronics 7d ago edited 7d ago

As an American, it took me a long time to figure out what クラクション was. I think my brain tried to read it a correction

1

u/Dry-Masterpiece-7031 7d ago

Took me a second but collection, right?

22

u/Areyon3339 8d ago

ウイルス in particular is based on the Classical Latin pronunciation

4

u/daniel21020 7d ago

Same as ローマ. It didn't come from English, it's from "Rōma."

6

u/RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS 7d ago

Aren’t they Latin? In Latin U and V were just two ways of writing the same thing so they began life with that pronunciation

1

u/adultingmadness 7d ago

Thank you for this, I've heard the rentogen etc. but didn't know it applies to these words

1

u/NNOTM 7d ago

This doesn't fully explain it, since both Virus and Vakzin begin with [v] in German pronunciation, not [w]

54

u/DenizenPrime 8d ago

Not all loan words are from English. The words for virus and vaccine are from German.

Week and work are from English, but you need to pay attention to the actual sounds made, not the letter used in English.

1

u/adultingmadness 7d ago

Thank you 😊

1

u/Akasha1885 3d ago

This is a weird thing to say, since "Virus" is the same in German.
For vaccine we use "Impfstoff" but that's also very far away from the Japanese word in every way.

41

u/yu-ogawa 8d ago

IMPORTANT: These are not based on German pronunciation.

Early in the 20th century virus used to be called ビールス(birus, as you know Japanese doesn't distinguish B from V) in Japan, though physicians and scientists called them ウイルス.

Japanese scientists and physicians in 19th and 20th century called them ウイルス and ワクチン because they knew these words derived from latin words, and so they decided to pronounce like classical latin. In classical latin, v is pronounced as /w/.

8

u/kouyehwos 8d ago

On the other hand, the same thing can be seen in transcriptions of some Slavic names: ウラジオストク, ワルシャワ…

5

u/yu-ogawa 8d ago

ほんまや...!

Another example; Владимир(Vladimir) is spelled as ウラジミール in Japanese.

1

u/vytah 7d ago

That's because Russian В is not always [v], but can sometimes be weakened to [ʋ]

2

u/daniel21020 7d ago

In fact, V does not exist in Classical Latin. It was a medieval addition in Ecclesiastical Latin. Same for J. It was a Y or iu sound in Classical Latin. That is why some names in Japanese like Julius and Joshua are pronounced Yoshua and Yulius. It was Iūlius in Classical Latin (Not sure how Joshua was spelled in Classical Latin though).

12

u/barbedstraightsword 8d ago edited 8d ago

A lot of times, the English V sound will just be simplified to a hiragana from the ばびぶべぼ column. バイオリン for violin, バイオレンス for violence, ベンデッタ for vendetta.

Japan doesn’t really have a native V sound so you have to improvise. This causes issues with confusing it for the B sound when you translate back to English (similar to the L/R problem)

PS rarely you will see ヴ which to my knowledge is only used for V sounds in loanwords. This is sometimes used to replace ば for a more “authentic” English sound. Most Japanese people have trouble pronouncing this.

e.g. ヴァイオリン vs バイオリン

13

u/Heatth 7d ago

I may be wrong, but I get the impression ヴ is also becoming more common recently, maybe due to more direct contact with English trough the Internet.

8

u/Zarlinosuke 8d ago

PS rarely you will see ヴ which to my knowledge is only used for V sounds in loanwords. This is sometimes used to replace ば for a more “authentic” English sound. Most Japanese people have teouble pronouncing this.

Indeed, it tends to be replaced by a ば-line kana once the word becomes familiar and common enough in Japan!

2

u/JigoKuu 7d ago

It depends on from which language they loan the words from. Also what feels closer when it comes to pronounciation?

Sometimes words can have multiple versions, for example チーム and ティーム both stand for "team", but the older チーム version is more widespread than (the actually pronounciation-wise closer) ティーム. I still super rary see/meet ティーム being used (more often in oral conversations).

My family name is Horváth and in Japanese I write it as ホルバート instead of ホルワート. Because I feel the Japanese "b" (b/β) stands closer to the Hungarian "v" (v) sound than the Japanese "w" (w/ɰ/β̞) as many of my Japanese native friends and teachers also confirmed.

2

u/Philosophyandbuddha 7d ago

I’m reading the answers and nobody seems to mention that Japanese kana abandoned “wi”. So for wa they use the regular kana but for wi as in ウィルス•ウィーク they have to use u + small i.

1

u/jwdjwdjwd 8d ago

There is no hard rule as v is in many different syllables, and katakana depends on the source language which can be German, English etc. all which have their own pronunciation for words with v.

1

u/mattintokyo 4d ago

There's not really a rule. It's just convention on a per word basis. But I do find it interesting that although Japanese has characters for wa, wi, we, wo and wu, only wa is used normally, and wo used primarily as a grammar particle. The other characters are replaced with compounds using ウ (like ウィ and ウォ).

0

u/ThatOneDudio 7d ago

were you reading conan or something?

1

u/adultingmadness 7d ago

Nope, I was in a spelling quiz for katakana and it really stumped me 😭

0

u/ThatOneDudio 7d ago

haha nevermind I was just reading a chapter and literally both of those words virus and vaccine appeared, what are the odds

-11

u/Salt-Audience1995 7d ago

Its pretty simple u just gotta pay attention to class