6 ms·

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

by 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
      > 塔 can be pronounced as tou No it can't, unless someone is spelling it out, or singing it in a song where it is given two notes, or just hyper-correcting their speech based on their knowledge of writing. Annoyed speech and such can break words into their morae for empahsis, which breaks up dipthongs. E.g. angry Japanese five-year-old: ga kkō ni i ki ta ku nā i!!! (I don't wanna go to school!!!) "nā i" is not the regular way of saying "nai". The idea that "nai" has that as an alternative pronunciation is a strawman.
      - uasi 10mo ago
        You're right. I looked up 現代仮名遣いの告示 [0] for the first time, and it says 塔（とう） is officially pronounced as "too". I had it backwards - I thought that 塔 is "tou", but due to the varying sounds of う, people could (and often preferred to) pronounce it as "too" in everyday speech. This kind of misconception seems not uncommon. There's an FAQ on NHK's website [1] that addresses the question of whether 言う（いう） is pronounced "iu" or "yuu". The answer is "yuu", and the article make it clear that: "It's not that [iu] is used for polite/careful speech and [yuu] for casual speech - there is no such distinction." I think native speakers learn words by hearing them and seeing them written in hiragana, before learning the underlying rules, so they know "too" is written as とう, but might not realize that とう shouldn't be pronounced as "tou" or いう as "iu". These are at least less obvious than cases like は in こんにちは never being "ha". Personally, if I heard someone say 塔 as "tou" or 言う as "iu", I probably wouldn't count it as incorrect, nor would I even notice the phonetic difference. [0] https://www.bunka.go.jp/kokugo_nihongo/sisaku/joho/joho/kijun/naikaku/gendaikana/honbun_dai1.html https://www.bunka.go.jp/kokugo_nihongo/sisaku/joho/joho/kiju... [1] https://www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/research/kotoba/20160801_2.html https://www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/research/kotoba/20160801_2.html
        BalinKing 10mo ago
        FWIW I think 言う is a different phenomenon entirely, because おう is pronounced as two vowels when it has grammatical meaning (in this case, as the verb ending), or between different words/morphemes. But my (non-native) understanding was that for nouns and such, or within the main morpheme of a verb (e.g. 葬る), “ou” is (usually) indistinguishable from “oo”.
- uasi 10mo ago
  > 方 and 頬 (hou vs hoo) is a better example. As a native Japanese speaker, this example is eye-opening. I hadn't even realized that the u in 方 is pronounced as /o:/ — I believe most Japanese people haven't either, despite unknowingly pronounce it that way. Also, I have no idea how to Hepburn-romanize 方 vs 頬, 負う vs 王, and 塔 vs 遠. If I had to romanize, I would just write it as whatever the romaji input method understands correctly (hou/hoo, ou/ou, and tou/too, in this case).
  - kazinator 10mo ago
    Your comment is astonishing. If you know the word 方, that it is /ho:/, and you know that it has a う in it when written out, how can you not know that う stands for making the o long? The only vowel is the long o. Japanese kindergarten kids can recognize hiragana words with "おう", correctly identifying it as /o:/. By the time they learn the 方 kanji they would have seen it written in hiragana upmpteen times, like AよりBのほうがいい and whatnot.
    - uasi 10mo ago
      Well, speaking for myself, I internalized how う is pronounced differently in different contexts when I was young, and by now I've almost forgotten there's a difference I need to be conscious of. When I hear /ho:/ in a certain context, "ほう(方)" immediately comes to mind, without noticing that what I heard was a long o. To me it's just the う sound. And if someone pointed to their face while saying /ho:/, I'd think it's the お sound as in "ほお(頬)".
    - raincole 10mo ago
      Because they're a native speaker. Native speakers are often utterly oblivious to the 'rules' of their own languages. Every time I read a rule about my mother tongue (Mandarin) online I was like, lol what nonsense foreigners made up... And then I realize that rule does exist. I just have internalized it for so long.
      - pitkali 10mo ago
        A typical example for English is the adjective order.
- decimalenough 10mo ago
  > 負う and 王 are both hepburn-romanized as ou though No, it's ou vs ō.
  - _0ffh 10mo ago
    Oh, I thought the added u and the bar were just two different ways to indicated that the o is stretched (the u looking like a workaround to avoid special characters).
- kazinator 10mo ago
  Nope! Writing 王 as "ou" is "wāpuro rōmaji" or modified Hepburn. Proper Hepburn wants ō. Which cannot be used for 負う.

by retrac 10mo ago

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
    > 塔 can be pronounced as tou No it can't, unless someone is spelling it out, or singing it in a song where it is given two notes, or just hyper-correcting their speech based on their knowledge of writing. Annoyed speech and such can break words into their morae for empahsis, which breaks up dipthongs. E.g. angry Japanese five-year-old: ga kkō ni i ki ta ku nā i!!! (I don't wanna go to school!!!) "nā i" is not the regular way of saying "nai". The idea that "nai" has that as an alternative pronunciation is a strawman.
    - uasi 10mo ago
      You're right. I looked up 現代仮名遣いの告示 [0] for the first time, and it says 塔（とう） is officially pronounced as "too". I had it backwards - I thought that 塔 is "tou", but due to the varying sounds of う, people could (and often preferred to) pronounce it as "too" in everyday speech. This kind of misconception seems not uncommon. There's an FAQ on NHK's website [1] that addresses the question of whether 言う（いう） is pronounced "iu" or "yuu". The answer is "yuu", and the article make it clear that: "It's not that [iu] is used for polite/careful speech and [yuu] for casual speech - there is no such distinction." I think native speakers learn words by hearing them and seeing them written in hiragana, before learning the underlying rules, so they know "too" is written as とう, but might not realize that とう shouldn't be pronounced as "tou" or いう as "iu". These are at least less obvious than cases like は in こんにちは never being "ha". Personally, if I heard someone say 塔 as "tou" or 言う as "iu", I probably wouldn't count it as incorrect, nor would I even notice the phonetic difference. [0] https://www.bunka.go.jp/kokugo_nihongo/sisaku/joho/joho/kijun/naikaku/gendaikana/honbun_dai1.html https://www.bunka.go.jp/kokugo_nihongo/sisaku/joho/joho/kiju... [1] https://www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/research/kotoba/20160801_2.html https://www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/research/kotoba/20160801_2.html
      - BalinKing 10mo ago
        FWIW I think 言う is a different phenomenon entirely, because おう is pronounced as two vowels when it has grammatical meaning (in this case, as the verb ending), or between different words/morphemes. But my (non-native) understanding was that for nouns and such, or within the main morpheme of a verb (e.g. 葬る), “ou” is (usually) indistinguishable from “oo”.
uasi 10mo ago
> 方 and 頬 (hou vs hoo) is a better example. As a native Japanese speaker, this example is eye-opening. I hadn't even realized that the u in 方 is pronounced as /o:/ — I believe most Japanese people haven't either, despite unknowingly pronounce it that way. Also, I have no idea how to Hepburn-romanize 方 vs 頬, 負う vs 王, and 塔 vs 遠. If I had to romanize, I would just write it as whatever the romaji input method understands correctly (hou/hoo, ou/ou, and tou/too, in this case).
- kazinator 10mo ago
  Your comment is astonishing. If you know the word 方, that it is /ho:/, and you know that it has a う in it when written out, how can you not know that う stands for making the o long? The only vowel is the long o. Japanese kindergarten kids can recognize hiragana words with "おう", correctly identifying it as /o:/. By the time they learn the 方 kanji they would have seen it written in hiragana upmpteen times, like AよりBのほうがいい and whatnot.
  - uasi 10mo ago
    Well, speaking for myself, I internalized how う is pronounced differently in different contexts when I was young, and by now I've almost forgotten there's a difference I need to be conscious of. When I hear /ho:/ in a certain context, "ほう(方)" immediately comes to mind, without noticing that what I heard was a long o. To me it's just the う sound. And if someone pointed to their face while saying /ho:/, I'd think it's the お sound as in "ほお(頬)".
  - raincole 10mo ago
    Because they're a native speaker. Native speakers are often utterly oblivious to the 'rules' of their own languages. Every time I read a rule about my mother tongue (Mandarin) online I was like, lol what nonsense foreigners made up... And then I realize that rule does exist. I just have internalized it for so long.
    - pitkali 10mo ago
      A typical example for English is the adjective order.
decimalenough 10mo ago
> 負う and 王 are both hepburn-romanized as ou though No, it's ou vs ō.
- _0ffh 10mo ago
  Oh, I thought the added u and the bar were just two different ways to indicated that the o is stretched (the u looking like a workaround to avoid special characters).
kazinator 10mo ago
Nope! Writing 王 as "ou" is "wāpuro rōmaji" or modified Hepburn. Proper Hepburn wants ō. Which cannot be used for 負う.