Talk:ヴェネツィア

Spellings

@Eirikr Can you cite your usage notes? I mean the exact status or statistics, not just the fact that one spelling can be found in some old (and possibly dated) dictionaries. ヴェネツィア beats ベネチア on Google search; also, in Kojien, ベネチア is redirected to ヴェネツィア. ばかFumiko￥^talk 13:33, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

• @Fumiko, some findings:

google books:ベネチア produces 27,300 hits, collapsing to 323 when paging through. (I'm not really sure what's going on with Google and the pages of this vs. the result count listed at the top, but anyway.) google books:ヴェネツィア produces 14,600 hits, collapsing to 294 when paging through.

Neither Daijirin nor Daijisen (nor several other JA-JA references) even have an entry under ヴェネツィア, but they do have one under ベネチア.

I don't have my SMK5 or KDJ to hand at the moment, but I dimly recall similar results there as well.

I note that web-wide Google searches show a slight preference for ヴェネツィア, at 975,000 for google:"ヴェネツィア" vs. 889,000 for google:"ベネチア". However, excluding wikis and dictionaries tilts the results back the other way, at 744,000 for ヴェネツィア and 795,000 for ベネチア. I havenʻt done enough research to confirm, but subjectively, it also seemed like many of the sites using the ヴェネツィア spelling are tourism related, possibly even with connections to Italian companies or governmental organizations, which might account for their preference for a kana spelling closer to the Italian pronunciation.

That said, the general weighting of ベネチア over ヴェネツィア makes sense, given the rarity of the /v/ sound in Japanese, and the inability of most native Japanese speakers to even make the sound, as well as the rarity of the /t͡si/ sound and similar pronunciation difficulties for native speakers, combined with the tendency for Japanese kana spellings to reflect the phonetics of how people actually pronounce the words. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 23:57, 2016 February 28‎ (UTC)

@Eirikr One more thing, why haven't you create an entry for ベネチア? ばかFumiko￥^talk 01:27, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

• @Fumiko -- same reason I haven't finished all the JA entries -- I haven't gotten around to it. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 02:43, 29 February 2016 (UTC)