As a general rule, Japanese speakers who acquired only Japanese as their first language will have difficulty pronouncing consonant clusters.

With the exception of stopped consonants and the /n/ phoneme, Japanese phonology expects every consonant to be followed by a vowel. For example, the /ts/ consonant cluster is common but is always followed by /u/. Since "fruit" is pronounced /furuutsu/ in Japanese, we get the cute transliterated English title of Fruits Basket.

The /th/ phonemes /ð/ and /θ/ don't exist, so a word like "the" is pronounced /za/ (and sometimes /ji/). As such, /za/ has come to occupy its own weird sociolinguistic dimension as a repurposed cognate.

Peter Backhaus digs into the unique ways Japanese have come to use /za/ (ザ) in The Japan Times.

One of its chief functions is to spotlight some sort of prototypicality in the word it is paired up with.

Take the phrase ザ・月曜日 (za getsuyōbi, "the" Monday). When someone says this to you, they do not simply want to inform you about the day of the week. What this means is it's one of those miserable, most Monday-like Monday mornings that really have it in for you. Think sick kids, torrential rainfalls, train delays, etc.

Another example from my own collection of ザ cases: A Japanese friend who had just changed jobs complained to me that the new work environment was really ザ・会社 (za kaisha, "the" company). Which was to say it was full of red tape, opaque procedures, cemented hierarchies and everything else one commonly associates with the unpleasant aspects of corporate life.

The stereotyping capacities of ザ also come to the fore when pigeonholing people. ザ・お嬢様 (za o-jōsama, "The" Miss Princess), for instance, can be used to characterize someone who's perceived as excessively posh, and ザ・サラリーマン (za sararīman, "the" salaryman) is for people who are, well, extraordinarily ordinarily salaryman-like.

But ザ also does a great job in extracting positive stereotypes.

Two examples from [linguist Ayako] Kajiwara's data are ザ・トマト (za tomato, "the" tomato) and ザ・和食 (za washoku, "the" Japanese cuisine). The first one designates a particularly "tomatoic" specimen of the fruit, in terms of color, taste, juiciness, what have you, while the second evokes a textbook example of a classic Japanese meal. The washoku that out-washokus all others.

As Backhaus concludes, "there is nothing the Japanese language can't swallow when eating its way through the English language."

Labels: japanese, japanese culture, language