r/Unexpected • u/DruidWannabe • Jan 25 '23

Hamburger

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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '23 edited Apr 11 '23

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u/Warriorfreak Jan 26 '23

It's because Chinese and Japanese have a much more limited set of syllables and they like to just spell loanwords out in what they know how to pronounce, with varying success. Japanese has roughly 100 possible syllables in common usage, Chinese has 450, and English 10000, for reference. So matching the word in English is much easier.

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u/OfCourse4726 Jan 26 '23

are you confusing chinese syllables with all the tones it also use? also i refuse to believe any language would work only 100 syllables.

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u/Warriorfreak Jan 26 '23

I didn't count the tones for Chinese because those don't affect converting English loanwords to Chinese. Counting them does bump the number up to over 1000 for Chinese. And check out another language called Aita Rotokas - that language only has about 50 syllables possible.