Don't 不吉, 富士通 sound alike?


Isn't it an issue that 不吉, 富士通 sound alike? At least for non-Japanese
speakers. For Western companies, they would avoid any even slight associations
with something negative.




They sound completely different. Native speakers, at least, will never have
the idea that the two sound similar.

  * じ and き are different characters with totally different sounds. Or do you think "G" and "key" sound alike in English?
  * Only 富士通 has an elongated つ at the end, which is a very important distinguishing feature in Japanese. See: [Are there many occurrences of elongated syllables throughout the language?](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/65027/5010)
  * Most importantly, they show different pitch accent patterns: 不吉 (ふきつ【LHH】) is _heiban_ (flat), whereas 富士通 (ふじつう【LHLL】) is _nakatakadaka_ (middle-high). This means it's difficult to confuse them even in an extremely noisy environment where one cannot distinguish "G" and "key".

Foreigners who don't give a damn about accents and long vowels might think
_fujitsu_ and _fukitsu_ are a bit alike, but I wonder how many of them know
the word 不吉.

By the way, there is even a word
[不実](https://jisho.org/search/%E4%B8%8D%E5%AE%9F) (ふじつ【HLL】) which means
"unfaithful". Even though 不実 and 富士通 are romanized the same way (Fujitsu),
they sound totally different to native Japanese speakers because of the
difference in the vowel length and the accents. Also note that many English
words sound alike to those who don't speak English. For example _flight_ and
_fright_ sound identical to Japanese speakers.

