Talk:Japanese phonology

Moras or Morae

Isn't the plural of mora morae? This article uses "moras" exclusively. Does this need copyediting? GiggyMantis (talk) 17:11, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

At least it is consistent. My dictionary says both are acceptable. Equwal (talk) 14:20, 4 May 2024 (UTC)

Recent additions: queries

@Urszag, regarding your recent additions, I've got a couple questions.

• About セロ, any chance that this is less "a unique exception showing adaptation of [t͡ɕe] to [se]" and more a simple matter of spelling pronunciation? Over in the NKD entry here at Kotobank, this is cited first to 1909, by which point anyone borrowing the term may have gotten it from a text and incorrectly assumed it was English, where a selo pronunciation for the spelling ⟨cello⟩ would be somewhat expected.
• About り, you added that "For example, Japanese has a suffix, |ri| that contains what Kawahara (2006) calls a "floating mora" that triggers gemination in certain cases (e.g. |tapu| +|ri| > [tappɯɾi] 'a lot of').". I'm not sure if this is an accurate characterization: the development of CVCCV-ri adverbs suggests instead that this may be more a matter of emphasis, where gemination is a common mechanism for this. For instance, we have pisshari and also pishari, zakkuri and also zakuri, (verb-derived) anmari and also amari, among others, where the geminated versions are often described in monolingual JA references as emphatic forms, such as with a note like〔「ungeminated version」を強めた語〕. Historically, the non-geminated versions are generally cited earlier than the geminated forms. Consider also zaburi, cited to 1275 (NKD entry), and zanburi, cited to 1735 (NKD entry). Apparently zaburi may come from even older saburi, cited to 1221 (NKD entry).
• Is 十針 citable with a reading of juhhari? I can only find tohari in references, suggesting that this juhhari may be either a dialectal pronunciation, or a relatively recent innovation.
• Is あふれる citable with a reading of ahureru? I have never seen mention of ふ pronounced as [hu] as opposed to [ɸu]; the biomechanics of the face and the place of articulation of the /u/ as realized in media-standard Japanese actually makes that difficult. Perhaps this is just a formatting / notation confusion? The other words in that short list suggest that these were intended to be romanizations, where ふ would be "fu" in Hepburn romanization, but from context, maybe these were supposed to be /phonemic slash notation/ instead? Otherwise, the "hu" looks strangely out of place here.

Cheers, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 23:08, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for asking about these; it's really nice to get feedback regarding the substance of the article!

1. I also personally suspect that セロ could be a spelling pronunciation based on English spelling-to-sound rules, but the two sources cited treat it as an adaptation of [tʃe] (which doesn't seem impossible in light of the better-attested depalatalization of [dʒe] to [(d)ze] in some forms). Given its exceptional nature, it might not be necessary to mention this form in this article; I guess I included it mainly because it makes it harder to say without qualification that [tʃe] is always adapted faithfully (which otherwise seems to be accurate).
2. The part about the 'floating mora' in forms ending in -ri was there before my recent edits: it seems to have been added by User:Aeusoes1 here. I haven't read much about these forms yet, but based on what you say it does sound like the gemination may not be strictly linked to the addition of the suffix. Perhaps our description could be reworded to make it more accurate. As with a number of forms cited as evidence of Japanese phonology, I also wonder how productive the pattern of adding /N/ in this context is. Schourup and Tamori 1992:135 seem to imply that it might not be demonstrably productive when they make a point of saying there are only around 15 total examples of forms with /N/ in this context (citing Hamano 1986:139). Labrune 2012:105 cites other examples of /N/~/Q/ complementary distribution in forms prefixed with bu-.
3. I was also starting to wonder about how frequent the Sino-Japanese readings with /hh/ that Labrune mentions are. Labrune 2012 only mentions them in passing, but cites Lawrence, Wayne P . (1999) 'Ha-gyōon no mae no sokuon - gendaigo ni okeru /Qh/ [Geminate h in modem Japanese], Kokugogaku 199: 16-27" as the source.
4. " ahureru" isn't a phonetic transcription and definitely isn't meant to indicate [hu] as opposed to [ɸu]: "hu" is just how Nasu romanizes ふ here. I suppose that should be standardized to Hepburn style 'fu' to avoid confusion about this.

Unrelated to this, I have actually seen some descriptions that state that [hɯ] or something close to it may occur as as realization of ふ, in contrast to the standard description of it as [ɸɯ], but it's been hard for me to find peer-reviewed or printed academic sources that talk about this. Maddieson 2005 compares the Japanese pronunciation to Ewe and finds differences; Watanabe (2009) gives a mostly impressionistic argument; both also cite Uehara & Kiyose 1974's description. I've also seen an acoustic study by Scott Ruddell that suggests the use of [ɸ] in this context is variable ("An acoustic study of the Japanese voiceless bilabial fricative", Scott Ruddell, San Francisco State University) but this seems to have been an undergraduate project, and so I suppose not a suitable reference for this article to use.

Another question: when you used [ɸu], was [u] simply a convenient broad transcription, or did you intentionally use it instead of [ɯ]? Nardog's recent edit to standardize the phonetic transcriptions in the article reminded me that I feel somewhat conflicted about the practice of using [ɯ] as a broad transcription of Japanese /u/. While most learner-oriented linguistic material in English seems to use [ɯ], I think I've seen some use of [u] as a broad transcription in academic works. I found this presentation by Nogita and Yamane 2018 that argues that /u/ is phonologically accurate and suggests the absence of phonetic rounding might be no more pronounced than for Japanese /o/ or English /ʊ/, which are both commonly transcribed broadly as [o] and [ʊ]: here

--Urszag (talk) 02:20, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for the reply. 😊

• Re: ふ possibly pronounced as [hu], that is very interesting. I have subjectively noticed that the Japanese [ɸ] is somewhat like a blend between stricter definitions of [h] and [ɸ], inasmuch as the shape of the face when pronouncing the Japanese /u/ (more on that below) lends itself to this consonantal sound by dint of merely devoicing and increasing the amount of airflow. No need to change the shape of the lips, etc. I could well be wrong, not having studied this in any depth, but it seems to me that other instances of [ɸ], as in the colloquial urban UK English pronunciation of initial ⟨th⟩ like in thought, involve more compression of the lips to produce a more markedly fricative sound.
• Re: [u] in my query above, ya, that was me being lazy and just using the keyboard "u". Another interesting paper, thanks for the link. I do notice this tidbit in the front matter:

The participants read aloud Japanese 5 short vowels (/i, e, a, o, u/) in isolation 12 times...

I've noticed before that asking just about anyone to pronounce a specific sound in isolation usually results in a different realization as opposed to how that sound is usually produced in regular speech, so I have to wonder if the protrusion this study noticed in how some speakers say /u/ was more an artifact of the rarified pronunciation parameters, rather than anything indicative of how people normally speak. (Admittedly, I have so far only skimmed the paper, so the authors might address this somewhere.)

‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 19:01, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

Westbury and Hashi 1997 do suggest protrusion could be unnaturally emphasized in the laboratory. I think it seems a bit unexpected for speakers to add rounding in this context if the vowel typically has a completely unrounded target.--Urszag (talk) 20:18, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

Satooya

Vance (2008: 58ff) backs up his claim of vowel rearticulation with waveforms. A glottal stop/constriction is also a possibility, but I would regard it as a possibility parallel to rearticulation, not a different description of the same phenomenon. Nardog (talk) 19:21, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for clarifying, I found it hard to tell whether the different descriptions were supposed to be referring to the same thing or not. In the case where glottal constriction is not involved, the transcription [ˀ] seems pretty inapt, but I guess there isn't any established IPA symbol for rearticulation.--Urszag (talk) 20:18, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

Moraic consonants

@Fdom5997, could you clarify what useful information you think I removed in this diff? Since it involved adding separate sections for the moraic nasal and moraic obstruent, some information relevant to only one of these was put in the appropriate section. For example, I did not remove the examples [sanneɴ] 三年, sannen, 'three years' and 三枚, sanmai, 'three sheets' from the article: they remained in the appropriate section for the moraic nasal, along with new examples I added for this sound before other consonants.

When you partially reverted me, you re-added these examples under the section for the moraic obstruent, as well as re-adding the examples [sat̚.tɕi] 察知, satchi, 'inference' and 一歳, issai, 'one year old. So all of those are now listed twice in the article: do you feel that is really necessary? I did remove the phonemic transcriptions from the table, but they remain in the article in the paragraph following the table. You also duplicated the sentence "The phonemic analysis of moraic consonants is disputed."

I did remove one of the old examples, [ip̚.pai] 一杯, ippai, 'one cupful', because the analysis of geminate [pp] is a bit more complicated (as it has limited contrast with singleton [h], some more abstract analyses treat them as somehow belonging to the same phoneme) and it seemed more straightforward and therefore better to use [aka] 垢, aka, 'dirt' and [ak̚ka] 悪化, akka, 'worsening', a minimal pair supplied by Vance, as an example of a geminate plosive. Urszag (talk) 03:29, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

Well, if you simply simplified it, then there should not be anything wrong there. But I think you should stop removing information that is already there. If you are going to add info, then go ahead. But you shouldn’t need to keep removing information here. Fdom5997 (talk) 03:35, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

I apologize for how these big edits can make it difficult to tell whether information was removed or just rearranged. My goal wasn't to remove information, just to rearrange it into a format that I thought might be more readable. I will make another edit and only remove the portions of the article that I think are currently duplicated (so there should be no loss of information): look it over and see if you agree.--Urszag (talk) 03:39, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

Juhhari

The sokuonbin (sandhi gemination) of 十 jū as /(d)ʑuQ/ as in juhhari is proscribed on the basis that /uː/ does not become /uQ/ in other words, and /(d)ʑiQ/ is the prescribed form, but AFAIK nobody says jihhari aside from trained professionals. Nardog (talk) 19:51, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for clarifying. After I edited that citation, I did a web search and saw a bit more about the pronunciation of 十 as /(d)ʑuQ/, e.g. 二十歳 (mentioned on Wiktionary). Other websites that mention it are HiNative, Reddit, this website. It sounds like some dictionaries recognize it now, but I haven't had time to find a citation covering that topic yet. In any case, I think it's clear that juhhari is genuinely the form that is being mentioned in the context of this discussion. Does jihhari exist even as a prescribed form, or would the prescribed form be jūhari? That's what jisho gives in its entry for the sentence "今日の一針、明日の十針。" (It cites Tatoeba, but confusingly, on that site the pronunciation of 十針 is shown as tohari.)--Urszag (talk) 20:58, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

jihhari is the prescribed form AFAIU. That sentence is a fixed phrase and 十針 is read as tohari apparently. Nardog (talk) 21:07, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

Pitch accent clarification

"An initial unaccented mora isn't always pronounced with low pitch when it occurs as part of a heavy syllable. Specifically, when the second mora of an accent phrase is /R/ (the latter part of a long vowel) or /N/ (the moraic nasal), the first two moras are optionally either LH (low-high) or HH (high-high). In contrast, when the second mora is /Q/ the first two moras are LL (low-low). When the second mora is /i/, initial lowering seems to apply as usual to the first mora only, LH (low-high)."

I've read this several times and can't make heads or tails of it. Japanese pitch accent doesn't include the words "bimoraic" or even "heavy" so I'm not sure where these diverged. Clarifications, examples, or redirection appreciated! DAVilla (talk) 07:53, 21 August 2024 (UTC)

This is talking about words like the following examples from the pitch accent article: kōban (first syllable is kō, which ends in /R/), manga (first syllable is man, which ends in /N/), seppuku (first syllable is sep, which ends in /Q/) and aijin (first syllable is ai, which ends in /i/). Words like kōban and manga start out with an HH or optionally LH pitch pattern, words like seppuku start with an LLH pitch pattern, and words like aijin start with an LH pitch pattern (these patterns apply when words start with a syllable of this form that is unaccented).--Urszag (talk) 11:00, 21 August 2024 (UTC)

Vowel nasalization

Regarding the recent edits by an IP who commented "Fixed incorrect information. Japanese's lack of nasalization can be seen objectively in MRI scans", but without adding additional sources. I have noticed contradictions between what different sources say about vowel nasalization in Japanese, and some of the previously cited sources were old and possibly outdated or based on impressionistic rather than quantitative analysis (e.g. Akamatsu 1997 pp 57, 298). So I'm not going to entirely revert the IP edits. Nevertheless, the statement "vowels next to nasal consonants do not exhibit nasalization" contradicts the currently cited source, Vance (2008), pp. 56–59, which says "a Japanese vowel is nasalized when it immediately precedes a syllable-final nasal consonant". To the IP editor, please find a source to back up the assertion that vowels are not nasalized even before syllable-final nasal consonants. The article would benefit from more recent, comprehensive sources on this topic, but we can't say something that isn't verifiable. Urszag (talk) 18:43, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

This is a different computer, but that's very reasonable criticism. I used https://rtmridb.ninjal.ac.jp/ to see MRI footage. I also wasn't fully correct. The ん sound does cause nasalization of the previous vowel if it is followed by a vowel or fricative, or preceded by a nasal consonant. On the other hand, if neither of these conditions are met, nasalization doesn't happen until the ん itself. Nasalization also doesn't occur before normal nasal consonants like ま. Words I looked at included hema, kaNtaN, siNsoH, niNmu, aNzeN, and kaNbu. The website dates itself to April 1st 2024, so it's certainly quite new. I'm not experienced with Wikipedia editing and apologize for the trouble, but I want this article to be as accurate as possible. 2605:AD80:14:7010:5044:583C:AAD3:825B (talk) 06:39, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for pointing me towards this resource! To give some background about Wikipedia policies, the norm is to make sure statements in articles can be supported by reliable secondary sources. That means any generalizations that can be made from this interesting data can't be put in the article until we can find a source to cite for analysis of this sort of data. I know having inaccurate or incomplete information in the article is frustrating, but the goal of that policy is to avoid the risk of having articles be based on amateur analysis rather than expert consensus. I'm going to try to see if I can find some papers that discuss these contextual factors to nasalization of the vowel before ん.--Urszag (talk) 22:57, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

Spinning off an onbin article

Since the article is getting on the longer side now, I was thinking it might make sense to create a separate article about onbin that could get more into the details of it as a historical process (rather than just part of the current language). I started a draft here: User:Urszag/Onbin but I wanted to share this suggestion now since I see @Mazamadao has been working now on expanding the onbin section. My thought would be that specific examples of lexical onbin, such as those currently listed in the "-hito" section (shirōto, etc.) are more a matter of diachronic change than synchronic phonology, and so could be moved into a new onbin article (I would also move dialect verb forms, since this article is not intended to comprehensively describe dialects other than standard Tokyo-based Japanese), while a summary of onbin changes, and examples of grammatical onbin in standard Japanese inflection, should remain in this article. Does anyone object to moving that material once a new article is created? Urszag (talk) 08:28, 8 September 2024 (UTC)

I published Onbin as its own article. Since nobody commented, I went ahead and moved the specific examples of onbin in compounds of hito/-bito to that page.--Urszag (talk) 06:41, 13 September 2024 (UTC)