2

I had always heard it as "Yeddo", but then the other night the Japanese actors in the new Shōgun series seem to favor the un-glided "Edo," and looking it up on jisho.org I find that the furigana give it as えど, though they quote Wikipedia in saying that "Yeddo" was used for purposes of romanization.

It seems to me that if we believe the furigana, there is no "y-glide" to start the first syllable. Why would we need to add one for romanization? It is exceptionally clear to me that English, at least, has no trouble pronouncing the initial /e/ in egg or Ed or Eminem, so why should the glide be necessary?

Is there no single pronunciation of the city in Japanese? Or has the one with the glide changed over the centuries into the one without?

Robusto
  • 1,228
  • 11
  • 16

1 Answers1

5

Modern Japanese does not contain a 'ye' syllable except in loanwords. It appears that, when 'e' and 'ye' first merged, the sound was 'ye', and so early Europeans spelled terms like Edo in this way. However eventually it changed so that 'e' was the sound used in all contexts. Source: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%B1%9F#Japanese

However, I'm honestly surprised you'd heard 'Yedo' more than Edo. Is your native language something other than English, by any chance? Maybe it held on to that spelling longer if so.

Angelos
  • 11,435
  • 1
  • 28
  • 62
  • 1
    My native language is English. It was in studying Japanese art that I kept hearing English academicians using "Yedo," but when I studied Japanese qua Japanese language the subject of 江戸 somehow never came up. – Robusto Mar 13 '24 at 21:57
  • 3
    It would depend on the age of the sources you were studying, then, I suppose. – Karl Knechtel Mar 13 '24 at 23:25