5 ms·

The ō in Hepburn could correspond to おう or おお or オー. That's an ambiguity. What's the issue here? They all sound exactly the same, although おお seems unusual. Th

by juancn 10mo ago

The ō in Hepburn could correspond to おう or おお or オー. That's an ambiguity. What's the issue here? They all sound exactly the same, although おお seems unusual. The choice of kana kinda depends on the what you're writing.

timr 10mo ago
They’re not the same. おう is discernible from おお, and the difference can be important. That said, this is far from the most important problem in Japanese pronunciation for westerners, and at speed the distinction between them can become very subtle.
- jhanschoo 10mo ago
  Do you have an academic source that describes this difference in pronunciation in native speakers in normal usage?
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
- rokob 10mo ago
  I’m new to the language and thought these would be the same. But I just listened to some words with the two and the おお definitely has like a bigger o sound. That’s quite subtle.
  - timr 10mo ago
    You’ll hear it more easily with time. It’s hard to completely separate stuff like this from context (i.e. it’s far more rare to have a collision in sound that makes sense if you know the rest of the sentence), but it does matter for discriminating between words when you’re trying to look words up, for example.
    - kazinator 10mo ago
      I've never heard of the /o:/ of おう and おお being different. I've never seen a small child, or foreign speaker, being corrected in this matter; i.e that they are using the wrong /o:/ for the word and should make it sound like this instead. This is literally not a thing that exists outside of some foreigners' imaginations. You will sooner hear a difference from $1000 speaker cables before you hear this, and it will only be if you are the one who paid. You may be letting by pitch accent deceive you. In words that contain /o:/ it's possible for that to be a pitch boundary so that pitch rises during the /o:/ and that can contrast against another /o:/ word where that doesn't happen. The 頬 word in Japanese is "kinda funny" in that it has a ほお variant and a ほほ variant. It has always stood out in my mind as peculiar. I'd swear I've heard an in-between "ほ・お" that sound somewhat reminiscent of "uh oh", with a bit of a volume dip or little stop that makes it sound like two /o/ vowels. It could be that the speaker intends ほほ, but the second /h/ sound is not articulated clearly. It may even be that the ほほ spelling was invented to try to represent this situation (which is a wild guess, based on zero research). In any case, the situation with that cheeky little word doesn't establish anything general about おお/こお/そお/とお... I've been fooled by my imagination. For instance, many years ago I thought I would swear that I heard the object marker を sound like "WO" in some songs; i.e. exactly how it typed in romaji-based input methods, because it belongs to the わ group. Like "kimi-o" sounding like "kimi-wo". Today I'm convinced it is just a kind of 空耳 (soramimi). Or the artifact of /i/ followed by /o/ without interruption, becoming a dipthong that passes through /u/: it may be real, but unintentional. It's one of those things that if you convince yourself is real, you will tend to interpret what you are hearing in favor of that. E.g. in Moriama Naotarō's "Kisetsu no mado de" (季節の窓で), right in the first verse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FjvNqg3034 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FjvNqg3034 That's actually a good example because there are so many covers of that, you can see whether you hear the "whoopy wo" from differnt speakers. There is a similar situation in the pronunication o 千円. There is a ghost "ye" that appears to the foreign ear. To the point that we have developed the exonym "yen" for the Japanese currency!!! The reality is more like that the /n/ is nasalized, similarly to what happens when it is followed by /g/. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ONt6a1o-hg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ONt6a1o-hg OK, finally, let's crack open the a 1998 edition of the the NHK日本語撥音辞典. On pages 832-833, we have all the /ho:/ words, with their pronunications including pitch accents: ホー with falling accent after ホ: 方、砲、鵬、朴 And, our cheeky word 頬 gets a separate entry here due to its pronunications ホー and ほほ。Both have a falling pitch after the leading ほ, like 方. No difference is noted. ホー with pitch rising at the "o": 法、報 So of course if you compare someone saying 法律 vs 頬, there will be a difference. But a lot of longer ほお words have the same rising pitch like 法. 法律 (ほうりつ） vs 放り出す（ほおりだす）is the same. Fairly intuitively, 頬張る（ほおばる）has rising pitch at the お、in spite of 頬 by itself exhibiting falling pitch.
- kazinator 10mo ago
  Yes, for instance こうり（小売）is completely different from こおり（氷）. If you're trying to say that when those two denote /o:/ it is a different /o:/, you are laughably wrong. It is not reliably discernible as a statistical fact you can gather from a population sample of native speakers over many words, if they are asked to speak normally (not using spelling as emphasis, or using the words in a song).
  - timr 10mo ago
    > If you're trying to say that when those two denote /o:/ it is a different /o:/, you are laughably wrong. There's literally a different sound, which is why the difference in kana exists. Disagree if you like -- as I said, it's subtle -- but I don't know why you feel the need to be insulting about it. Writing an inaccurate non-kana symbol for the two sounds is no more an argument than saying that the sounds are identical because they share a common romanization. There are some words where you can more clearly hear the difference than others. Consider, for example, the pronunciation of 紅茶, vs your example of 氷. It's not wrong to pronounce the former as a long o, but you can hear the difference when natives say it. Similarly, こういう is not said as こおいう, and 公園 is not こおえん.
    - kazinator 10mo ago
      The difference in kana was not recently selected in order to represent a feature of the contemporary language. It is historic!!!
      - z500 10mo ago
        I think the confusion here is in the placement of the vowels. おお and おう do sound identical when pronounced as a single unit, but the おう in 小売 (こ.うり) isn't a single unit, it's just a お that happens to be next to a う
        timr 10mo ago
        This might be true. I’ve never thought about it deeply enough!
makeitdouble 10mo ago
The main issues probably arise on official documents and stuff with financial impact. Like how many people end up with the same romanized name while being distinct in other alphabets. Then discrepancies between the different systems because they usually are sloppy on the handling of these matters. Now that most stuff is electronic, these small differences can have wider effects and be a PITA to fix.
- throwaway2037 10mo ago
  > The main issues probably arise on official documents and stuff with financial impact. Do you have evidence of this? Else, I doubt it. Most official documents will also require your residence address. If you are signing any official documents, they will check your zairyu or My Number card for both photographic similarity, romaji (roman character) spelling of your name, and residence address. All of these in combination can easily uniquely identify a foreign resident in Japan.
  - makeitdouble 10mo ago
    You're looking at the checks done by a human. And I'd argue those are already problematic enough, yes I've heard of first hand stories of people stuck at the airport explaining that the spelling on they passport and their reservation name being different. People pay attention on international flights now, but still fall for the other traps. I remember a guy buying concert tickets with the most common spelling and getting stuck at the gate as they had nothing on them matching it. The worst part is the automated checks, and sure it's a huge PITA. I've spent 1h30 last weekend at a docomo shop to have my name recognized by their system, with the guy looking at the papers and not understanding why it wouldn't do it. That's with near perfect matching between the documents. Imagine having spellings mismatched. Banks also have a different matching system (Katakana based, with a string length limit, for account matching, and another WTF system for card owner matching), which is screwed in its very own way. That's one of the main reasons for the debacle with the MyNumber Card bank account matching last year. > uniquely identify a foreign resident Uniquely being identified is the easy part. Being _properly_ identified is something else altogether.
retrac 10mo ago
In the phonetic alphabet it's /e:/ vs. /ei/ and /o:/ vs. /ou/. If you're an English speaker, you can be forgiven for a very stereotypical trait of the English accent. English speakers have a real hard time with the /e/ or /e:/ sounds as well as the /o/ and /o:/ sounds. Most English dialects don't have either a monophthong /e/ or /o/. Both the long and short tend to get heard as /eɪ/ and /oʊ/. French enchanté /ɑ̃ ʃɑ̃ te/ is heard and borrowed as /ɑn.ʃɑn.teɪ/. German gehen /ge:n/ is heard as "gain" /geɪn/. And Japanese /o:/ and /ou/ both get heard as /oʊ/. It's arguably a minimal pair in Japanese: 負う /ou/ (to carry), 王 /o:/ (king).
- Anon1096 10mo ago
  負う and 王 are both hepburn-romanized as ou though. 方 and 頬 (hou vs hoo) is a better example. I don't really think native speakers still distinguish these. Feel free to try listening yourself though: 頬, note that it has multiple pronunciations but we only care about hoo: https://forvo.com/word/%E9%A0%AC/#ja https://forvo.com/word/%E9%A0%AC/#ja 方 https://forvo.com/word/%E6%96%B9%E3%80%80%EF%BC%88%E3%81%BB%E3%81%86%EF%BC%89/#ja https://forvo.com/word/%E6%96%B9%E3%80%80%EF%BC%88%E3%81%BB%... In some cases though there is still a clear difference in pronunciation for most speakers, ex 塔 vs 遠
  - BalinKing 10mo ago
    Could you elaborate on the last sentence? Wiktionary claims they're pronounced the same modulo pitch accent, but Wiktionary's phonetic transcriptions are (mostly?) auto-generated AFAIK.
    - uasi 10mo ago
      塔 can be pronounced as tou, too, or somewhere between the two. It depends on the speaker, speaking style, and possibly dialect. Either way, Japanese speakers rely more on context and pitch accent than actual pronunciation, so it communicates fine.
      - kazinator 10mo ago
drtgh 10mo ago
> What's the issue here? You need to know previously the word to write from Hepburn to Kana when "ō" is present because data is lost in such transliteration from おう or おお or オー to Hepburn. The internet is full of romanji written incorrectly with "o" alone when it should be "ou" or "oo" due "ō" ASCII conversion errors at one moment. (The sooner a beginner embrace Hiragana and Katakana, the better)

by juancn 10mo ago

timr 10mo ago

They’re not the same. おう is discernible from おお, and the difference can be important. That said, this is far from the most important problem in Japanese pronunciation for westerners, and at speed the distinction between them can become very subtle.

jhanschoo 10mo ago
Do you have an academic source that describes this difference in pronunciation in native speakers in normal usage?
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
rokob 10mo ago
I’m new to the language and thought these would be the same. But I just listened to some words with the two and the おお definitely has like a bigger o sound. That’s quite subtle.
- timr 10mo ago
  You’ll hear it more easily with time. It’s hard to completely separate stuff like this from context (i.e. it’s far more rare to have a collision in sound that makes sense if you know the rest of the sentence), but it does matter for discriminating between words when you’re trying to look words up, for example.
  - kazinator 10mo ago
    I've never heard of the /o:/ of おう and おお being different. I've never seen a small child, or foreign speaker, being corrected in this matter; i.e that they are using the wrong /o:/ for the word and should make it sound like this instead. This is literally not a thing that exists outside of some foreigners' imaginations. You will sooner hear a difference from $1000 speaker cables before you hear this, and it will only be if you are the one who paid. You may be letting by pitch accent deceive you. In words that contain /o:/ it's possible for that to be a pitch boundary so that pitch rises during the /o:/ and that can contrast against another /o:/ word where that doesn't happen. The 頬 word in Japanese is "kinda funny" in that it has a ほお variant and a ほほ variant. It has always stood out in my mind as peculiar. I'd swear I've heard an in-between "ほ・お" that sound somewhat reminiscent of "uh oh", with a bit of a volume dip or little stop that makes it sound like two /o/ vowels. It could be that the speaker intends ほほ, but the second /h/ sound is not articulated clearly. It may even be that the ほほ spelling was invented to try to represent this situation (which is a wild guess, based on zero research). In any case, the situation with that cheeky little word doesn't establish anything general about おお/こお/そお/とお... I've been fooled by my imagination. For instance, many years ago I thought I would swear that I heard the object marker を sound like "WO" in some songs; i.e. exactly how it typed in romaji-based input methods, because it belongs to the わ group. Like "kimi-o" sounding like "kimi-wo". Today I'm convinced it is just a kind of 空耳 (soramimi). Or the artifact of /i/ followed by /o/ without interruption, becoming a dipthong that passes through /u/: it may be real, but unintentional. It's one of those things that if you convince yourself is real, you will tend to interpret what you are hearing in favor of that. E.g. in Moriama Naotarō's "Kisetsu no mado de" (季節の窓で), right in the first verse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FjvNqg3034 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FjvNqg3034 That's actually a good example because there are so many covers of that, you can see whether you hear the "whoopy wo" from differnt speakers. There is a similar situation in the pronunication o 千円. There is a ghost "ye" that appears to the foreign ear. To the point that we have developed the exonym "yen" for the Japanese currency!!! The reality is more like that the /n/ is nasalized, similarly to what happens when it is followed by /g/. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ONt6a1o-hg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ONt6a1o-hg OK, finally, let's crack open the a 1998 edition of the the NHK日本語撥音辞典. On pages 832-833, we have all the /ho:/ words, with their pronunications including pitch accents: ホー with falling accent after ホ: 方、砲、鵬、朴 And, our cheeky word 頬 gets a separate entry here due to its pronunications ホー and ほほ。Both have a falling pitch after the leading ほ, like 方. No difference is noted. ホー with pitch rising at the "o": 法、報 So of course if you compare someone saying 法律 vs 頬, there will be a difference. But a lot of longer ほお words have the same rising pitch like 法. 法律 (ほうりつ） vs 放り出す（ほおりだす）is the same. Fairly intuitively, 頬張る（ほおばる）has rising pitch at the お、in spite of 頬 by itself exhibiting falling pitch.
kazinator 10mo ago
Yes, for instance こうり（小売）is completely different from こおり（氷）. If you're trying to say that when those two denote /o:/ it is a different /o:/, you are laughably wrong. It is not reliably discernible as a statistical fact you can gather from a population sample of native speakers over many words, if they are asked to speak normally (not using spelling as emphasis, or using the words in a song).
- timr 10mo ago
  > If you're trying to say that when those two denote /o:/ it is a different /o:/, you are laughably wrong. There's literally a different sound, which is why the difference in kana exists. Disagree if you like -- as I said, it's subtle -- but I don't know why you feel the need to be insulting about it. Writing an inaccurate non-kana symbol for the two sounds is no more an argument than saying that the sounds are identical because they share a common romanization. There are some words where you can more clearly hear the difference than others. Consider, for example, the pronunciation of 紅茶, vs your example of 氷. It's not wrong to pronounce the former as a long o, but you can hear the difference when natives say it. Similarly, こういう is not said as こおいう, and 公園 is not こおえん.
  - kazinator 10mo ago
    The difference in kana was not recently selected in order to represent a feature of the contemporary language. It is historic!!!
    - z500 10mo ago
      I think the confusion here is in the placement of the vowels. おお and おう do sound identical when pronounced as a single unit, but the おう in 小売 (こ.うり) isn't a single unit, it's just a お that happens to be next to a う
      - timr 10mo ago
        This might be true. I’ve never thought about it deeply enough!

makeitdouble 10mo ago

The main issues probably arise on official documents and stuff with financial impact. Like how many people end up with the same romanized name while being distinct in other alphabets. Then discrepancies between the different systems because they usually are sloppy on the handling of these matters. Now that most stuff is electronic, these small differences can have wider effects and be a PITA to fix.

throwaway2037 10mo ago
> The main issues probably arise on official documents and stuff with financial impact. Do you have evidence of this? Else, I doubt it. Most official documents will also require your residence address. If you are signing any official documents, they will check your zairyu or My Number card for both photographic similarity, romaji (roman character) spelling of your name, and residence address. All of these in combination can easily uniquely identify a foreign resident in Japan.
- makeitdouble 10mo ago
  You're looking at the checks done by a human. And I'd argue those are already problematic enough, yes I've heard of first hand stories of people stuck at the airport explaining that the spelling on they passport and their reservation name being different. People pay attention on international flights now, but still fall for the other traps. I remember a guy buying concert tickets with the most common spelling and getting stuck at the gate as they had nothing on them matching it. The worst part is the automated checks, and sure it's a huge PITA. I've spent 1h30 last weekend at a docomo shop to have my name recognized by their system, with the guy looking at the papers and not understanding why it wouldn't do it. That's with near perfect matching between the documents. Imagine having spellings mismatched. Banks also have a different matching system (Katakana based, with a string length limit, for account matching, and another WTF system for card owner matching), which is screwed in its very own way. That's one of the main reasons for the debacle with the MyNumber Card bank account matching last year. > uniquely identify a foreign resident Uniquely being identified is the easy part. Being _properly_ identified is something else altogether.

retrac 10mo ago

In the phonetic alphabet it's /e:/ vs. /ei/ and /o:/ vs. /ou/. If you're an English speaker, you can be forgiven for a very stereotypical trait of the English accent. English speakers have a real hard time with the /e/ or /e:/ sounds as well as the /o/ and /o:/ sounds. Most English dialects don't have either a monophthong /e/ or /o/. Both the long and short tend to get heard as /eɪ/ and /oʊ/. French enchanté /ɑ̃ ʃɑ̃ te/ is heard and borrowed as /ɑn.ʃɑn.teɪ/. German gehen /ge:n/ is heard as "gain" /geɪn/. And Japanese /o:/ and /ou/ both get heard as /oʊ/. It's arguably a minimal pair in Japanese: 負う /ou/ (to carry), 王 /o:/ (king).

Anon1096 10mo ago
負う and 王 are both hepburn-romanized as ou though. 方 and 頬 (hou vs hoo) is a better example. I don't really think native speakers still distinguish these. Feel free to try listening yourself though: 頬, note that it has multiple pronunciations but we only care about hoo: https://forvo.com/word/%E9%A0%AC/#ja https://forvo.com/word/%E9%A0%AC/#ja 方 https://forvo.com/word/%E6%96%B9%E3%80%80%EF%BC%88%E3%81%BB%E3%81%86%EF%BC%89/#ja https://forvo.com/word/%E6%96%B9%E3%80%80%EF%BC%88%E3%81%BB%... In some cases though there is still a clear difference in pronunciation for most speakers, ex 塔 vs 遠
- BalinKing 10mo ago
  Could you elaborate on the last sentence? Wiktionary claims they're pronounced the same modulo pitch accent, but Wiktionary's phonetic transcriptions are (mostly?) auto-generated AFAIK.
  - uasi 10mo ago
    塔 can be pronounced as tou, too, or somewhere between the two. It depends on the speaker, speaking style, and possibly dialect. Either way, Japanese speakers rely more on context and pitch accent than actual pronunciation, so it communicates fine.
    - kazinator 10mo ago

drtgh 10mo ago

> What's the issue here? You need to know previously the word to write from Hepburn to Kana when "ō" is present because data is lost in such transliteration from おう or おお or オー to Hepburn. The internet is full of romanji written incorrectly with "o" alone when it should be "ou" or "oo" due "ō" ASCII conversion errors at one moment. (The sooner a beginner embrace Hiragana and Katakana, the better)