Toront

This is a random diversion.

Native Japanese speakers often mispronounce Toronto as “Toront” or Apache as “Apatch”. There’s a good reason for this.

In Japanese, every word must end with a vowel or the sound “n”. Therefore, when rendering consonant clusters and final consonants in Japanese, extra vowels are added. Hence, “Sukottorando” for Scotland or “Furansu” for France.

In fact, since most English words do end in a consonant, Japanese speakers become accustomed to the idea that the final vowel exists only in the Japanese version of a word or name. Thus, when saying the word in English, they will tend to drop every final short vowel, as far as possible.

In most cases, this gives a good approximation to the original word. In the case of words that should end in a vowel, however, it has the opposite result to that which was intended. Hence, “Toront” and “Apatch”—neither of which are actually English in their original forms, of course! In fact, both words come from Native American languages ( perhaps).