So, I'm not proficient in Japanese but, as a programmer, I decided to create a
program to generate katakana equivalents of english words automatically.

I have had some success, but with some ambiguities. For example, the phonetics
for "though" being:

```

    (American): /ðo/
    (British): /ðəʊ/
    
```

My program generates: `ゾー`

A friend of mine told me that `ゾゥ`, also corresponds to "though", but she
couldn't explain me why.

I guess what I want to know is what is the reasoning behind deciding the
conversion of `though` to either have `ー` or `ゥ`?

> I read in a paper study, saying that most katakana words are derived from
> British english.
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2020-03-04T08:18:40.160
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question
katakana english-to-japanese phonology gemination
Difficult to understand katakana of the word "though"
I'm not a native English speaker, but as Eiríkr Útlendi pointed out in the
comment section, I feel there is a /ʊ/ sound even in American English (as long
as the word is pronounced slowly and clearly). This can be confirmed by
several sources on the net.

  * Wiktionary: <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/though#Pronunciation>
  * Forvo: <https://forvo.com/word/though/>

However, Japanese speakers are generally bad at English
[diphthongs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diphthong), and they are often
replaced by long vowels when katakanized, anyway. For example "no" (/noʊ/) is
normally written as ノー rather than ノゥ, and "page" (/peɪdʒ/) is ページ rather than
ペィジ.

So, it ultimately depends on your purpose. ゾゥ is more "faithful" in a sense
and preferred in dictionaries (e.g., see [ALC's
entry](https://eow.alc.co.jp/search?q=though&ref=sa)), but ゾー is perfectly
acceptable in many other cases.

By the way, what is your program's output for "note"? If it's ノート, then ゾー may
be more consistent. But if your program outputs ノゥト, then you may want it to
output ゾゥ for "though", too.
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answer