Originally Posted by
Eloah
Okay to start, Japanese only has their set number of pronunciations, which in total is like 150 or so; its a really small number. English on the other hand has over 4,000 pronunciations, as well as many other non Asian influenced languages. in order to fix this, new characters were added to the Japanese Hiragana and Katakana charters to represent more "western" pronunciations. This is the reason why the myth that Shiva originally being Shiver is false since the characters for Shiva are シヴァ the last "two" being a new character to represent Va.
The next thing to indicate is that there are certain characters that they use in place of some of our more "complex" sounds. Su representative of our Th is the most common example. These characters are actually what denote a similar sound in other languages not necessarily the corresponding letter. For example an elongated A or O sound would/could represent an Er sound. And while most people are aware of the changing of these characters with the " marks, they may not know that is to vocalize the sound, something we do in other languages naturally. In these instances its to show the reader that its the vocalized version, even if the translated letter isn't. This is the case with the Fantasy, in Final Fantasy, ファンタジー the final character is Ji the voiced version of Shi, to make the reader aware of the proper pronunciation.