LogFAQs > #985917731

Nichtcrawler-X posted...

That's where we get the rarely used "Gokou".

I presume you're misremembering here, because "Gokou" is not a valid transliteration of his name and would be pronounced completely different (it would sound like "Goko" to an English ear, rather than "Goku").

His name in Japanese is , pronounced . If you want to be pedantic, the correct transliterations of that are Gok or Gokuu (both are equivalent), but chouon (the Japanese practice of extending vowels for certain words, which are indicated by a double-vowel [or an "ou" for most chouon "o" sounds] in transliterations) are sometimes omitted for English transliterations (for instance, "Tokyo" should actually be Toukyou or Tky, as both o's are chouon vowels, and "Kyoto" should be Kyouto or Kyto, as the first o is a chouon, but not the second). The practice of eliminating double vowels in English transliterations is significantly less common these days, but up until a couple of decades ago it was standard practice, so any words that were commonly transliterated prior to this century often had their sokuon vowels shortened in English transliterations and are now too engrained to change.

adjl posted...

Not knowing the full history for certain, it's probably from French, where it's also pronounced "Zed." In turn, changing it to Zee in US English was likely a matter of just trying to make it more consistent with other letters.

I kind of gave the truncated history above, which is that it was originally a Latin letter (which they borrowed from the Greek letter zeta (/). They kept the name, but changed the pronunciation from zay-ta to zeh-ta.

The Romance languages all used some variant of this (zeta in Italian and Spanish, zet in Romanian, z in Portuguese, and zde in French) and the Germanic languages, upon adopting the Latin alphabet, also named it similarly (for instance, German, Norwegian, and Dutch both used the Romanian "zet/zett", Danish uses zaet, etc.). The English zed was most likely most heavily influenced by the French, particularly around the time of the Norman conquests in the 1100s, which is when French had its biggest influence over English as a language.

"Zee" was an aberration that actually predates the US as a country, but was not widely spoken until the US adopted it and certain linguists (notably including Noah Webster, of Webster's dictionary fame) started promoting its use as a way to differentiate American English from its British counterpart (and also to rhyme the letter with its counterparts B, C, D, E, G, P, T, and V).