Well, this assignment was not as easy as I thought it would be for the simple reason of deciding on a single word from what is an unlimited selection. At first, I went with the word ‘sayonara’ because it’s a cool word that I use a lot while destroying Moblin’s and Lynel’s in the Legend of Zelda video game. Unfortunately, my research only found small blurbs or short articles about how ‘sayonara’ “may have” transformed over the years in the Japanese vocabulary and found its way into the English language. With such uncertainty I went to my vault of favorite words and came up with ‘tsunami’ as I love watching natural disasters.
Tsunami, meaning “harbor wave,” is also borrowed from Japanese language and is the combination of two words. “Tsu” for harbor and “Nami” for wave. The word ‘tsunami’ has a long history in Japan that is over 1000 years, but it wasn’t until the late 1800’s that it would begin being used, scarcely, in the English language. It would become a more commonly used word after the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami that hit Indonesia, killing 32,000 people. Strangely, if not amusing, the term ‘tidal wave’ was replaced by the word ‘tsunami’ because ‘tidal wave’ was not an accurate description of what the event was (it has nothing to do with the tide) and it was replaced by the word, tsunami, that is also not completely accurate to what the natural event is (it does not just happen in harbors).
But I digress, in Japan the word tsunami is pronounced with the ‘t’ as it does not violate their phonotactic constraints but when it became a borrowed word in American English, it did not conform to the word-initial consonant cluster constraints of the English language and thus it was adapted by dropping the sound of ‘t’ just pronouncing it as, tsunami : /suˈnɑmi/.
