# Why do Filipinos find /ts/ affricate too hard to pronounce?



## Ajura

Why do Filipinos find /ts/ affricate too hard to pronounce especially in word initial position?
When I watch a Pinoy dubbed anime I found something strange. They confuse /ts/ with tɕ and pronounce /ts/ as tɕ.An example of this is the name Tsukamoto in School Rumble in when pronounced by dubbers turns to Chukamoto in the dub and words like pizza /pitsa/ turns to pitɕa.


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## pusong_pinoy

If I understand the situation you are describing, it's opposite my experience with Tagalog.  There is no "ch" sound in the Tagalog language, so Filipinos will typically pronounce those words with a "ts" sound which is how the sound is Romanized in Tagalog. Examples would be "tsampion" for champion, or "tsiyurts" for church.  Some people can pronounce the "ch" better than others, just like some gringos are better at rolling their "r"s in Spanish words than others are, but you will never see a pure Tagalog word written with a "ch" in it.


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## Ajura

pusong_pinoy said:


> If I understand the situation you are describing, it's opposite my experience with Tagalog. There is no "ch" sound in the Tagalog language, so Filipinos will typically pronounce those words with a "ts" sound which is how the sound is Romanized in Tagalog. Examples would be "tsampion" for champion, or "tsiyurts" for church. Some people can pronounce the "ch" better than others, just like some gringos are better at rolling their "r"s in Spanish words than others are, but you will never see a pure Tagalog word written with a "ch" in it.


 
*F*or me \ty\ digraph makes sense in *T*agalog orthography instead of \ts\ because soft g which is the voiced counterpart is written as \dy\ in *T*agalog orthography*.* *T*agalog tʃ is actually tɕ and dʒ is actually dʑ in *T*agalog.
What *I* notice is that native alveolo palatals occur on demonstratives frequently dijan(noun)> dʑan(dem.) and tijan(noun.)>tɕan(dem.) and they sometimes dissapear in stress added syllables on loan words like junction which is sometimes pronounced as dijaŋɕon or dzaŋɕon and diego is normally pronounced as dʑego in *T*agalog.
Some posh people pronounce the soft g sound as ʑ especially Kris Aquino-/korek ka ʑan/*.*

Some dialects pronounce them as dz~z,s and ts respectively.


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