So, I'm not proficient in Japanese but, as a programmer, I decided to create a program to generate katakana equivalents of english words automatically.
I have had some success, but with some ambiguities. For example, the phonetics for "though" being:
(American): /ðo/
(British): /ðəʊ/
My program generates: ゾー
A friend of mine told me that ゾゥ
, also corresponds to "though", but she couldn't explain me why.
I guess what I want to know is what is the reasoning behind deciding the conversion of though
to either have ー
or ゥ
?
I read in a paper study, saying that most katakana words are derived from British english.