5 ms·

Those are modifications of existing vowels, or diphthongs. E.g. し(shi) + や(ya) = しゃ (sha), still the same 'a' sound. English has only 5 vowel characters but m

Those are modifications of existing vowels, or diphthongs. E.g. し(shi) + や(ya) = しゃ (sha), still the same 'a' sound. English has only 5 vowel characters but more than 5 vowel sounds.

lhorie 9y ago
I mean the weak `i` in や. きや (ki-ya, as in sukiyaki) sounds different than きゃ (kya, as in "argh"), similar to how "meow" can be pronounced /miˈaʊ̯/ or /mjaʊ̯/
- Nadya 9y ago
  きゃ is not きや as in "kiya" but きゃ as in "kya" - the i in き becomes silent, きや would be something else. For example, 東京 isn't pronounced「とうきよう」but 「とうきょう」.
  - lhorie 9y ago
    Right, Japanese has both /iˈ/ and /j/ sounds. Another example that happens outside the や column is イェス (yes).
    - chadlavi 9y ago
      this is just because of the shift of historical "ヱ" ("ye") getting pronounced as "エ" ("e") then just not used anymore. They're using "イ" as a semivowel here, /j/, not as the vowel /i/.
  - amyjess 9y ago
    Oddly enough, it's been my observation that in きゃ and ぎゃ, the /a/ sound is considerably fronted compared to other syllables. It's usually realized as the central vowel [ä], but in these two, it's often fronted to [a]. This is why these syllables are used to render English words containing /kæ/ into Japanese, such as "cannon" (キャノン kyanon) or "cat" (キャット kyatto). Contrast with "cut" (カット katto) or "car" (カー kā). Japanese has some interesting allophones. I also find the allophones in the Z-row fascinating as well ([z] and [d͡z] are allophones in free variation).
- zodiac 9y ago
  I think that /j/ sound is classified as a consonant, not a vowel
  - gizmo686 9y ago
    /j/ is a semivowel. Generally, these are classified and behave as consonants, but their vowel-like behavior still creeps in sometimes.
  - lhorie 9y ago
    Really? That's weird. It's the same /j/ sound as in portuguese pai[1] (/paj/) and it's unequivocally a vowel there. [1] https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/portuguese-english/pai https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/portuguese-engl...
    - gizmo686 9y ago
      Is it? I just did a brief search, and found this paper [0], which includes a phonological inventory of Brazillian Portuguese. It lists /j/ as a consonant. [0] http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/00238309020450020401 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0023830902045002...
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    NB: I've finally addressed a request for clarification from a couple of weeks back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16687856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16687856
- itsameta4 9y ago
  Japanese de-voices vowels in certain contexts adjacent to voiceless consonants. The weakness you're describing is the lack of voicing (vocal cords vibrating).
  - gizmo686 9y ago
    The きや　きゃ (kiya, kya) distinction is not a phonological alternation. For instance, we have ぎゃく (gyaku), despite the fact that /g/ and /y/ are both voiced.
    - itsameta4 9y ago
      I'm aware of this, however he specifically mentioned a weak sound in "sukiyaki" which is due to de-voicing the /i/.
- gizmo686 9y ago
  I believe the sound you identify as a weak `i` is the IPA sound /j/. This is not an unreasonably connection to make. /j/ is the semivowel corresponding to /i/. Essentially, /j/ is what happens if you produce /i/ with just enough constriction that it no longer is classified as a vowel. It is not apriori unreasonable to consider semivowels as vowels. However, linguistics has (mostly) reached the conclusion that semivowels are best characterized as consonants.
  - lhorie 9y ago
    That's really interesting. Does that mean then that the i in words like pai and イェス is classified as a consonant? I've seen ヴ - a variation of ウ (u) to simulate v, but had never thought of i as a potential consonant.
    - gizmo686 9y ago
      I would need to hear a native speaker say them to be sure. With my untrained ear, I have heard Japanese speakers use the diphthong /aɪ/ and the vowel sequence /a.i/ interchangeably. However, I suspect they are actually always pronouncing it as /a.i/, and I am just not good at distinguishing it. I they were to try and pronounce pie using the closest approximation available with Japanese phonetics, I suspect they will settle on /pa.i/, in which case it is a real /i/. If they were to pronounce it as /paj/, then Japanese photostatic would require adding a vowel at the end, likely giving us /paju/, which is not what we get. イェス (yes) is a bit more difficult to predict. Japanese does have all of the sounds nessasary to pronounce /jɛs/ without modification. The syllable structure would require the addition of a vowel at the end, giving us /jɛsu/. However, as far as I am aware, Japanese does does have the /jɛ/ sequence for some reason. The question is, how bad is the /jɛ/ sequence to Japanese speakers? If it is just a historical artifact that /jɛ/ doesn't occur in Japanese, then they should have no problem pronouncing /jɛs/ as such, in which case the イ would be the consonant /j/. However is /jɛ/ is actually a bad sequence, then it would be changed into its closest approximation, which would be /i.ɛ/, in which case イ is the normal vowel /i/. Based on the spelling (in particular the small ェ), they are at least trying to be faithful to the original English; as /i.ɛ/ has a perfectly normal spelling as イエ. To take a simmilar example from English. Consider the name "Juan" (ʒɒn). English speakers can typically pronounce this, but it sounds foreign, because English does not allow /ʒ/ to occur in the begining of a word. If they were to pronounce it the English way, they would get "John" (ʤɒn). Further, I suspect that the only reason English speakers can pronounce "Juan" so easily is exposure. I had a Brazilian Portuguese teacher (eg. a linguistics teacher whose native language is Brazilian Portuguese), whose name also begins with ʒ, but everyone pronounces it as "ʤ" and (it my experience), it was difficult to even understand what his name was until he pronounced it the with ʤ.
mcv 9y ago
> English has only 5 vowel characters but more than 5 vowel sounds. So what are we counting here? The sounds or the characters we use to represent the sounds? Because if you go by sounds, I think Dutch has more than 14. (a, aa, o, oo, e, è, ee, u, uu, i, ie, eu, ui, au, ij, oe) I've heard that in Czech, the 'r' can be a vowel. In a name like Brno, for example. Those are apparently two syllables. (I don't speak Czech, so no idea if it's true.)

Those are modifications of existing vowels, or diphthongs. E.g. し(shi) + や(ya) = しゃ (sha), still the same 'a' sound. English has only 5 vowel characters but more than 5 vowel sounds.

lhorie 9y ago

I mean the weak `i` in や. きや (ki-ya, as in sukiyaki) sounds different than きゃ (kya, as in "argh"), similar to how "meow" can be pronounced /miˈaʊ̯/ or /mjaʊ̯/

Nadya 9y ago
きゃ is not きや as in "kiya" but きゃ as in "kya" - the i in き becomes silent, きや would be something else. For example, 東京 isn't pronounced「とうきよう」but 「とうきょう」.
- lhorie 9y ago
  Right, Japanese has both /iˈ/ and /j/ sounds. Another example that happens outside the や column is イェス (yes).
  - chadlavi 9y ago
    this is just because of the shift of historical "ヱ" ("ye") getting pronounced as "エ" ("e") then just not used anymore. They're using "イ" as a semivowel here, /j/, not as the vowel /i/.
- amyjess 9y ago
  Oddly enough, it's been my observation that in きゃ and ぎゃ, the /a/ sound is considerably fronted compared to other syllables. It's usually realized as the central vowel [ä], but in these two, it's often fronted to [a]. This is why these syllables are used to render English words containing /kæ/ into Japanese, such as "cannon" (キャノン kyanon) or "cat" (キャット kyatto). Contrast with "cut" (カット katto) or "car" (カー kā). Japanese has some interesting allophones. I also find the allophones in the Z-row fascinating as well ([z] and [d͡z] are allophones in free variation).
zodiac 9y ago
I think that /j/ sound is classified as a consonant, not a vowel
- gizmo686 9y ago
  /j/ is a semivowel. Generally, these are classified and behave as consonants, but their vowel-like behavior still creeps in sometimes.
- lhorie 9y ago
  Really? That's weird. It's the same /j/ sound as in portuguese pai[1] (/paj/) and it's unequivocally a vowel there. [1] https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/portuguese-english/pai https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/portuguese-engl...
  - gizmo686 9y ago
    Is it? I just did a brief search, and found this paper [0], which includes a phonological inventory of Brazillian Portuguese. It lists /j/ as a consonant. [0] http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/00238309020450020401 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0023830902045002...
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  NB: I've finally addressed a request for clarification from a couple of weeks back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16687856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16687856
itsameta4 9y ago
Japanese de-voices vowels in certain contexts adjacent to voiceless consonants. The weakness you're describing is the lack of voicing (vocal cords vibrating).
- gizmo686 9y ago
  The きや　きゃ (kiya, kya) distinction is not a phonological alternation. For instance, we have ぎゃく (gyaku), despite the fact that /g/ and /y/ are both voiced.
  - itsameta4 9y ago
    I'm aware of this, however he specifically mentioned a weak sound in "sukiyaki" which is due to de-voicing the /i/.
gizmo686 9y ago
I believe the sound you identify as a weak `i` is the IPA sound /j/. This is not an unreasonably connection to make. /j/ is the semivowel corresponding to /i/. Essentially, /j/ is what happens if you produce /i/ with just enough constriction that it no longer is classified as a vowel. It is not apriori unreasonable to consider semivowels as vowels. However, linguistics has (mostly) reached the conclusion that semivowels are best characterized as consonants.
- lhorie 9y ago
  That's really interesting. Does that mean then that the i in words like pai and イェス is classified as a consonant? I've seen ヴ - a variation of ウ (u) to simulate v, but had never thought of i as a potential consonant.
  - gizmo686 9y ago
    I would need to hear a native speaker say them to be sure. With my untrained ear, I have heard Japanese speakers use the diphthong /aɪ/ and the vowel sequence /a.i/ interchangeably. However, I suspect they are actually always pronouncing it as /a.i/, and I am just not good at distinguishing it. I they were to try and pronounce pie using the closest approximation available with Japanese phonetics, I suspect they will settle on /pa.i/, in which case it is a real /i/. If they were to pronounce it as /paj/, then Japanese photostatic would require adding a vowel at the end, likely giving us /paju/, which is not what we get. イェス (yes) is a bit more difficult to predict. Japanese does have all of the sounds nessasary to pronounce /jɛs/ without modification. The syllable structure would require the addition of a vowel at the end, giving us /jɛsu/. However, as far as I am aware, Japanese does does have the /jɛ/ sequence for some reason. The question is, how bad is the /jɛ/ sequence to Japanese speakers? If it is just a historical artifact that /jɛ/ doesn't occur in Japanese, then they should have no problem pronouncing /jɛs/ as such, in which case the イ would be the consonant /j/. However is /jɛ/ is actually a bad sequence, then it would be changed into its closest approximation, which would be /i.ɛ/, in which case イ is the normal vowel /i/. Based on the spelling (in particular the small ェ), they are at least trying to be faithful to the original English; as /i.ɛ/ has a perfectly normal spelling as イエ. To take a simmilar example from English. Consider the name "Juan" (ʒɒn). English speakers can typically pronounce this, but it sounds foreign, because English does not allow /ʒ/ to occur in the begining of a word. If they were to pronounce it the English way, they would get "John" (ʤɒn). Further, I suspect that the only reason English speakers can pronounce "Juan" so easily is exposure. I had a Brazilian Portuguese teacher (eg. a linguistics teacher whose native language is Brazilian Portuguese), whose name also begins with ʒ, but everyone pronounces it as "ʤ" and (it my experience), it was difficult to even understand what his name was until he pronounced it the with ʤ.

mcv 9y ago

> English has only 5 vowel characters but more than 5 vowel sounds. So what are we counting here? The sounds or the characters we use to represent the sounds? Because if you go by sounds, I think Dutch has more than 14. (a, aa, o, oo, e, è, ee, u, uu, i, ie, eu, ui, au, ij, oe) I've heard that in Czech, the 'r' can be a vowel. In a name like Brno, for example. Those are apparently two syllables. (I don't speak Czech, so no idea if it's true.)