Yesterday I was practising katakana by writing my classmates' names down, but
some of the names were harder than I expected. I have a classmate named Väinö,
but neither the ä or ö sounds exists in Japanese. At first I considered
writing his name down as Waino, but that sounds like the word vaino which
means persecution in my native tongue. How should I write these vowels?

Has anyone had similar problems? How did you solve them?
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2018-04-18T08:25:00.433
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katakana names vowels
How do I write sounds that don't exist in Japanese?
unfortunately, Japanese is not well suited for representing the sounds of
words or names in other languages. Listening to that name online (assuming it
is the Finnish name that I found the pronunciation for) the closest katakana
would be ヴァーイネ which in romaji would be written Vaaine or Va-ine. Some people
might choose to write the katakana 'ne' (ネ) half-size, which in Japanese
represents that the sound should be minimized in some way. There are standard
and well understood versions of this like ファ、フェ、so you might get Japanese to a
closer approximation of your friend's name with 'Vaainue' where the katakana
'nue' is written ヌェ. Or go the other way and write it 'Vaaineu' with a
minimized 'u' sound.

Japanese people know that katakana cannot accurately represent the sound of
other languages well, so most of them will take care to listen to how your
friend pronounces his name, and try to mimic him. But for people seeing his
name in print and never hearing the proper pronunciation, expect to have to
help them get it right upon meeting them.
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When transcribing your name to Japanese, in principle you can choose a
transcription as you please.

For transcribing V, ヴァ・ヴィ・ヴ・ヴェ・ヴォ _va vi vu ve vo_ is standard. (See this
question, though: [Do Japanese actually pronounce the "v"
sound?](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/24498/1628))

As Japanese has only five vowels /aiueo/, vowels which are different in your
native language will have to be mapped to the same vowel in Japanese.

A common strategy is to ignore the diacritics and substitute Ä ­­→ A → /a/, Ö
→ O → /o/, etc. (not only in Japanese, but also in English!).

This also seems to be common for well-known people named Väinö:

  * [Väinö Raitio → **ヴァイノ** ・ライティオ](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%B4%E3%82%A1%E3%82%A4%E3%83%8E%E3%83%BB%E3%83%A9%E3%82%A4%E3%83%86%E3%82%A3%E3%82%AA)
  * [Väinö Siikaniemi → **ヴァイノ** ・シーカニエミ](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%B4%E3%82%A1%E3%82%A4%E3%83%8E%E3%83%BB%E3%82%B7%E3%83%BC%E3%82%AB%E3%83%8B%E3%82%A8%E3%83%9F)
  * [Väinö Linna → **ヴァイノ** ・リンナ](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%B4%E3%82%A1%E3%82%A4%E3%83%8E%E3%83%BB%E3%83%AA%E3%83%B3%E3%83%8A)
  * [Väinö Hannikainen → **ヴァイノ** ・ハンニカイネン](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%B4%E3%82%A1%E3%82%A4%E3%83%8E%E3%83%BB%E3%83%8F%E3%83%B3%E3%83%8B%E3%82%AB%E3%82%A4%E3%83%8D%E3%83%B3)

If that doesn't work for you for some reason or other, you can try to modify
it to ヴァイネ _Vaine_. (Note that Ö [[ø]] → /e/ is also standard for
transcription from German, as for example in **Kö** ln → **ケ** ルン, **Gö**
ttingen → **ゲ** ッティンゲン, Goethe [[ˈɡøːtə]] → **ゲ** ーテ, etc.)
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answer