– Vol.8 –
ARC teacher Mimi Sensei will answer your questions regarding Japanese language.
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It’s an issue about how to transcribe foreign words with katakana. In fact, you can see both the form “サンドイッチ” (sandoitchi) and “サンドウイッチ”(sandwich). To start from the conclusion, both are okay to use.
Originally it was used only the form “サンドイッチ/sandoitchi”, that’s why most of the times you will find this transcription. More recently however, Japanese people started using the word “サンドウイッチ/sandowitchi”, closer to the English phonetic, and more accurate for the pronunciation, and since then has been used.
For the same reason, there’re other words from English that have 2 katakana transcriptions. For example, the word “violin”. Since in Japanese there isn’t the sound “V”, we pronounced it “バイオリン/baiolin”, but now we can find many times the transcription “ヴァイオリン”.
In a similar way also, we may find foreign words that sometimes have and sometimes do not have, the chōonpu「ー」, to make sounds longer. Party can be written both as “パーティー” and “パーティ”, computer sometimes is “コンピューター” and other times “コンピュータ”. Both the versions are okay.
But if during a test you are not sure on which one is correct, well, you can write the version written in your textbook, just to be sure.