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Please consider the following:

```

    Warrior is ウォリアー： this vowel sound "a" changes to ”オ"
    Work is ワーク:this vowel sound "o" changes to "ア"
    Chariot is チャリオット:this vowel sound "a" stays "ア"
    Corridor is コリドー:this vowel sound "o" stays "オ"
    As for the other words that don't start with "w", "a" stays "ア", "o" stays"オ".
    Margin is マージン："a" stays "ア"
    Border is ボーダー:"o" stays "オ"....etc.
    
```

But only the words with starting with "w" are opposite. Do you know why?
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2020-03-13T01:50:45.707
74990
2020-03-13T16:49:52.387
2020-03-13T09:17:59.687
-1
37159
question
pronunciation katakana loanwords
Why are some Japanese foreign words spelled with different sounds?
Japanese katakana versions of English words are based on the sound of the
word, not the spelling.

> Work is ワーク:this vowel sound "o" changes to "ア"

"Work" is pronounced with the same vowel sound as "bird" or "heard", and they
all come out as アー in Japanese: ワーク, バード, ハード.

> But only the words with starting with "w" are opposite. Do you know why?

Your conclusion is false, it has nothing to do with w.
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2020-03-13T08:41:31.863
74994
2020-03-13T08:51:52.790
2020-03-13T08:51:52.790
74990
answer
To expand on Ben's answer, many English speakers get confused because we don't
realize that the English spelling of many words does not actually reflect very
closely how we actually say them. We get so used to them that we automatically
associate the English spelling with the pronunciation we already know, without
thinking of whether the vowels used are actually the "right" ones for those
sounds.

(Arguably, they are "right" by definition, because that's how English works,
but when we're going to another language, English rules don't apply anymore)

To start with, English has the concept of "hard" and "soft" vowels, but then
on top of that many times we don't even follow our own rules for pronouncing
those. The English vowels "a", and "o" are particularly bad with this, as
their pronunciation in English can actually be all over the place (though
actually "e", and "u" are often just as bad).

To make matters worse, many of these vowel sounds that we end up using don't
even exist in Japanese (there's just no good way to represent them). Japanese
has a fairly limited set of vowel sounds, and they're very rigid. "オ" always
means "oh", "ア" always means "ah". In English, sometimes, either "o" or "a"
can be pronounced "uh", but in Japanese, there's no such thing as "uh" at all
(you might think "ウ", but that's always "oo", not "uh". "エ" is "eh", which is
close, but still not the same, etc).

So when transliterating English words into Japanese, first, it's based on the
sound, not the English spelling, and second, many sounds have to be modified a
bit to fit the available options. On top of this, one needs to take into
account that many times this was being done by Japanese people who didn't even
speak English, who'd just heard the English word a couple of times and learned
its meaning, and in some cases it was a word that might not even have been
being spoken by a native English speaker when they heard it (for example, much
of the first communication with outsiders was via Portugese traders, who
sometimes used English words as well, but with a Portugese accent, etc).

So in many cases, if you actually sound out the Japanese words, you'll find
they sound much closer to the English pronunciation than they would if you
sounded out the English spelling according to Japanese vowel rules. In many
cases, however, even this isn't going to really sound the same, just because
Japanese can't do that, and in some cases, things are just weird because of
history, so if you're looking for any strong "rules" about this, you won't
really find them.

My general advice is don't try to think of these as English words anymore in
the first place: They're actually their own Japanese words, and should be
pronounced like Japanese words. The fact that they once-upon-a-time had some
relationship to English is just an etymological curiosity, and not that
important, just like how many English words were once derived from Latin or
German, but that doesn't mean they're actually Latin/German words anymore, and
we don't try to pronounce them the same way that the old Germans or Romans
did.
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2020-03-13T16:49:52.387
74997
2020-03-13T16:49:52.387
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answer