71974
If we take the word パーティ, why is テ pronounced as "ti" when in the katakana
alphabet it is pronounced "te." Also, why is ィ small? If it was normal sized,
wouldn't the pronunciation of the word be the same?
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2019-09-21T02:02:38.683
71971
2019-09-22T05:34:27.830
2019-09-22T05:34:27.830
11792
question
pronunciation katakana
Why is テ pronounced as “ti” in パーティ?
Besides only giving out an explanation, it might be better to state about some
Japanese background first.

Some Japanese come from two types of language: Chinese and English (or French,
Spanish, etc...). Here by saying "come from", I mean that these words might be
"borrowed from" other languages due to some reasons.

  1. For those words that might come from Chinese, they usually have a corresponding kanji besides only hiragana, and the pronunciations are similar to Chinese. For example: 単語（たんご）、日本（にほん）、お茶（おちゃ）、郵便局（ゆうびんきょく）

  2. For those words come from those languages other than Chinese （外来語）, they usually address these in katakana instead of hiragana. They usually don't have a corresponding kanji. Also, due to the lack of alphabets in Japanese, they create some expressions for more correctly address these words. For example: パーティー（party）、フォルダ（folder）

The second one is what you're confusing about. Take the word party as
explanation, テshould be pronounced as te originally. However, the alphabet
following with テ is in a lowercase (ィ） instead of uppercase（イ）. Thus, in this
case, the pronunciation becomes ti（ティ）. If it is written in a uppercase, you
should pronounce it as te- （長音 is another story, try to Google yourself if you
are not familiar with it.）

How to distinguish when to pronounce it as which one? You can just check the
size of the word that follow with it. If it is a lowercase, you should always
speak it with the former alphabet. Like the above フォルダ's ォ, so it's not
ふおるだ(fuoruda), but ふぉるだ(foruda).

In the case that you speak English, just try to figure out what it's
corresponding English word. Then you'll know which one it should be and
pronounce it in a Japanese way XD. ( You can cut down a lot of vocabularies
you need to memorize by this way.)

By the way, those vocabularies originated from Chinese has two kinds of
pronunciations (by 音読み or by 訓読み). The former has a similar pronunciation as
it is in Chinese which is my native language so I'm sure it is xddd) It is
also another story and you can try to know it in your way for learning
Japanese.
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2019-09-21T05:16:16.427
71973
2019-09-21T09:41:59.623
2019-09-21T09:41:59.623
18471
18471
71971
answer
How do you pronounce _th_ in _the_? Not a _t_ sound and then an _h_ sound,
right? You read it as one sound (the [voiced dental
fricative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_fricative)). Well, it's
a similar concept. It's not テ＋イ. It's ティ, with a small ィ, and together they
read as "ti". Actually, テイ (regular sized イ) could be "te" with an elongated
"e" sound, or it could be "te" + "i". I don't want to get into that, but
basically they're not pronounced the same, as you initially suspected.

Regardless, it's not unique to this pair. From
[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana#Syllabary_and_orthography),

> Small versions of the five vowel kana are sometimes used to represent
> trailing off sounds (ハァ haa, ネェ nee), but in katakana they are more often
> used in yōon-like extended digraphs designed to represent phonemes not
> present in Japanese; examples include チェ (che) in チェンジ chenji ("change"), ファ
> (fa) in ファミリー famirī ("family") and ウィ (wi) and ディ (di) in ウィキペディア
> Wikipedia.

I didn't quickly find a duplicate, but here's a somewhat similar question:
[Why is じどうしゃ (jidoushiya), jidōsha
instead?](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/50297/11792)

One of the answers makes reference to the following:

> Additional Letters [![ァ    ィ   ゥ   ェ   ォ
> ヴ](https://i.stack.imgur.com/BcCww.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/BcCww.png)
>
>   * These additional letters are invented in modern era to describe the
> sound of foreign languages.
>

>
> Examples  
>  ファ[fa] ティ[ti] ドゥ[du] ウェ[we] フォ[fo]
>
>   * ァ, ィ, ゥ, ェ and ォ(small ア[a] イ[i] ウ[u] エ[e] オ[o]) are attached after
> particular letters.
>

>
> Examples  
>  ヴァ[va] ヴィ[vi] ヴ[vu] ヴェ[ve] ヴォ[vo]
>
>   * ヴ is used for [v] sound.
>
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2019-09-21T05:45:26.727
71974
2019-09-21T06:21:48.500
2019-09-21T06:21:48.500
11792
11792
71971
answer