[philipov]

A Japanese speaker can learn to speak German, but that's not the same as a loan word. Japanese is a great example for how loan words are modified to conform to the phonemic structure of a language because it absorbed so much english in the past century.

"Fight" is a word in english, but the loan word in japanese is pronounced "faito" because the language demands that all words end in either a vowel or syllabic 'N'. Japanese people are capable of saying english words without ending them in a vowel, but then they're speaking english, not japanese.

The word for salmon roe in japanese is 'ikura'. This is a loan word from russian: 'ikra' for caviar. But because of the Consonant-Vowel structure of the language, a 'u' was added when the word was borrowed.

One of the funniest examples is when a word is borrowed by japanese speakers and then gets translated back into english, the translators won't always return it to the original form. The name Lily would be pronounced "Riri" in japanese (japanese speakers might not even notice the difference between R and L because they're the same phoneme), and when it's translated back into english, it might come back as "Really". This has been a source of consternation for video game players before.

Likewise, when american english speakers borrow a word from a language with a trill or rolling R, they make it conform to the phonemic structure of the language by changing to a retroflex R.

And these sorts of examples are found everywhere. Every language has a particular structure for how valid words can be formed, and speakers of the language will modify foreign words to fit the sounds they're trained to emit unless they're consciously trying to speak a different language.

[thaumasiotes]

> but the loan word in japanese is pronounced "faito" because the language demands that all words end in either a vowel or syllabic 'N'.

By the way, it's worth observing that that is a requirement of the kana writing system, but it's not a requirement of the language. [It also isn't a requirement of the kanji writing system, in which a symbol can indicate any arbitrary sequence of sounds, but that system is difficult to use for purposes of indicating pronunciation.] There are circumstances in which high vowels are entirely deleted, the most prominent example being the ordinary pronunciation of です /desɯ/ with no final vowel at all.

The fact that "fight" gets borrowed as "faito" also looks like an artifact of the spelling system - /o/ is not a high vowel and can't be deleted, but in native Japanese there is no tu syllable - that space in the syllabary is occupied by the affricated tsu, so loanwords that originally ended in /t/ or /d/ are given the final vowel /o/ instead. Illiterate Japanese might or might not interpret the English sound of "fight" the same way.

[philipov]

I was taught in Japanese language class that unvoiced vowels don't get entirely deleted. You're still supposed to aspirate them, which affects the pacing of the language, but it's hard to hear it because unvoiced vowels don't really make a sound.

[thaumasiotes]

> The name Lily would be pronounced "Riri" in japanese (japanese speakers might not even notice the difference between R and L because they're the same phoneme), and when it's translated back into english, it might come back as "Really". This has been a source of consternation for video game players before.

It's also a source of consternation for people who consume Japanese media. There is a particularly funny example in the franchise Ah! My Goddess, in which the demon Maaraa (named after the Buddhist demon whose name in Sanskrit is Maara) gets "translated" into English as "Marller".

It's easy to see how a Japanese person went from the Japanese name to the English one - long Japanese vowels are taken as indicating English rhotic vowels, and then the fact that it would be strange for a rhotic vowel to be followed by an R hints that the Japanese R should be interpreted as an English L - but it's not exactly well-motivated by the actual name of the demon. (And while it might make sense to Japanese speakers attempting to make English out of Japanese, it makes much less sense to English speakers attempting to do the same thing - we hear "maaraa" as "mara" and view the Japanese derhotification of our rhotic vowels as a mistake, not an equivalence.)