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Learn the Phonetic Alphabet
(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2026
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It drives me crazy that people skip the 't' in 'tsunami'. Do you want a vinegar wave? That's how we get vinegar waves
For all the bad rep French gets about not pronouncing letters in words, at least the t in tsunami is clearly pronounced. As is the p in psychologie, pseudo and pneumonie.
While it's true from an English speaker's perspective, to a non-native whose alphabet contains the 'ts' sound as a separate letter: there's no 't' sound in our 'ts' sound (which is just the letter 'c' for us - boring details in the spoiler section), since it's not a series of 't' and 's', but one consistent sound on its own, deserving its own letter.
So we would naturally say the 'ts' in tsunami doesn't have a 't' or an 's' (or any silent letter) in it.
spoiler
The 3 c's in 'pacific ocean' are all pronounced differently. We don't have that madness. Spelling to pronunciation is consistent. The first 'c' is just an 's' sound, so we just use our letter for the 's' sound. Which is 'sz'. It might look weird, but only because the letter 's' is preserved for the 'sh' sound. Unusual, but consistent. The middle 'c' is pronounced 'k'. We just use 'k' when it sounds like 'k'. So what do we use 'c' for? The 'ts' sound. Consistently. 'tsunami' is spelled 'cunami' here.This is why it sounded so weird when as a kid I watched an American film and they looked at a written word and went "How do you pronounce it?". WTF mate, it's written right there!
Phonetically though, the sound in question is composed of a t and an s sound. You can recognise that regardless of your own language.
Ts is an affricate, composed of a stop and fricative with the same place of articulation. The analysis is similar to analysing diphthongs as being composed of two vowel sounds.