Talk:Japanese phonology/Archive 1

Consonants

At present, this page lists /ɴ̩/ as one of the consonants. While widely acknowledged as a phonetically occuring allophone, it is not, to my knowledge, given as a phoneme in the literature. If I am mistaken, could someone provide references, please? If not, I will take it out.

Moreover, syllabicity (indicated by the vertical line under the symbol) is not normally treated as phonemic, and including it here is definitely a non-mainstream view of Japanese phonology. Accordingly, I have removed it.

Finally, I have added ɸ in the chart, as it is treated as phonemic by the majority of modern scholars. I also aligned ɸ and h so that they would be in the voiceless side of their columns. Godfrey Daniel 00:21, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

I believe that Shibatani treats it as a phoneme or archiphoneme. I dont remember what Timothy Vance says, but I would guess that he mentions something about this. Removing the syllabic diacritic is fine — I dont know how the IPA marks moraic consonants. My original exclusion of ɸ from the phoneme inventory was in keeping with an older analysis — feel free to update the page, I dont know the current literature anyway. peace – ishwar  (speak) 17:22, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

As I recall, Shibatani treats it as the archiphoneme N, not the concrete, place-of-articulation-specified honest-to-goodness segment ɴ. Vance also includes discussion of N (not ɴ), but, wily fellow that he is, never tells you exactly what he thinks.

In IPA usage, syllabic/moraic consonants are marked as you had it, but whether a given segment is syllabic or non-syllabic is not normally treated phonemically. Rather, it comes from a combination of syllable structure, the position of segments in a syllable, constraints on what segments may be syllabic, timing systems, and more. In fact, the IPA rescinded a symbol designed to represent the Japanese mora nasal when they realized that it was really just a regular nasal with a mora, and not a special articulation.

Since those were the references you used in coming up with the table (and it's a beautiful table!), I'll change ɴ to N, and put it in the placeless category. Later, when I have time, I'll add the competing analysis without N and Q (alluded to elsewhere on the page). Godfrey Daniel 20:37, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Made the change. In doing so, I noticed that there was no row for affricates, so I added one, as well as its members. While the argument can be made that affricates are allophones of stops, this only works in older varieties of Japanese. Vance includes affricates in his analysis of the modern language, as do most other scholars, so I believe we should include them here as well. Godfrey Daniel 20:53, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

I finally got around to changing all the ɴs to Ns, as well as making a few more changes. Godfrey Daniel 21:13, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

moved article

OK, I moved the article here, in accordance with the consensus reached in the brief discussion at Talk:Japanese_language#Proposal_to_move_Japanese_language.23Sounds_to_Japanese_phonology Tomer ^TALK 13:02, May 29, 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for moving it! However, it needs a lot of work...

Yes, it's good, but it needs work to be better. I'll do some work on it as time allows. Godfrey Daniel 00:21, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Japanese O

The Japanese 'O' is described as having a simmilar pronounciation to the O in the english word 'Go'. I've always been taught that it is closer to the O in 'Clock', or something in between the two.

The wovel in clock is much more like to a Japanese A. Japanese O is similar to the wovel in law.

That depends on your dialect of English. The vowel in clock is only close to Japanese A for Americans.. but even in American dialects, the vowel in go is very often a diphthong like [oʊ] or [əʊ], so isn't all that close to the Japanese [o]. --Ptcamn 19:52, 24 August 2005 (UTC)

I doubt there are any easily explained examples of non-dipthonged o's that could be used to compare with Japanese. It's probably simplest just to explain that it's similar, except not dipthonged.  freshgavinΓΛĿЌ  13:52, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

In a lot of the dialects it sounds like the oo in poor or o in pore (in my dialect those two sound the same O.o). -Iopq 07:00, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

back semivowel

Is Japanese w pronounced like a Spanish intervocalic g, as the article implies? To me they sound quite different... Maybe a /w/ (possibly with the less rounded diacritic) would be more accurate...--Army1987 21:26, 9 August 2005 (UTC)

Yes, you could do that, but as there is no IPA symbol that indicates lip compression the sound must be described. Choosing a given symbol in this case, does not explain what the sound is. Using [w] with a less rounded diacritic is also somewhat misleading. I think it is is better to use [ɰ] following Akamatsu & Ladefoged so that it will not be confused with [w] (which is the way it is symbolized in phonological works and transliteration). peace – ishwar  (speak) 21:58, 20 September 2005 (UTC)

Hi Ishwar,

I didn't see this until after I had changed the symbol to /w/. I'll tell you why I think <w> is better, but go ahead and revert if you wish.

1. ASCII letters are commonly used for their convenience or for their use in the orthography. Therefore people don't expect them to be precise. But when you go to the trouble of using a special IPA letter like [ɰ], people expect it to be correct.
2. Japanese /w/ is coarticulated, which is captured by [w] but not by [ɰ].
3. If you use w with a diacritic, as w̜, people know there's something funny going on, because it's so bizarre, and are more likely to read the explanatory notes.
4. If you want to be precise, perhaps [ɰ͡β̞] would work. But I personally would be quite confused by a simple [ɰ].

Also, do you have any idea if this is what the Iroquois 'unrounded' w is like?

kwami 07:24, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

hi. Although you have good points (capturing the coarticulation is persuasive), I think I prefer ɰ . If you write a bizarre symbol, maybe someone will take the trouble to read about it carefully as well, maybe more so than with w + diacritic. Plus w is so commonly used to indicate the rounded sound. I think that [ɰ͡β̞] is pretty good; I guess you could also use [ɰᵝ]. Akamatsu (coming from a pedogogical perspective in addition to descriptive) is very opposed using w (he also uses other symbols like p’ instead of pʲ as he wants to avoid an interpretation that this represents [pj]). But I dont really have a strong opinion either way. I'll just leave it the way it is (will have to make adjustments though). Maybe someone else will have an opinion. peace – ishwar  (speak) 04:58, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

As of 10/10/06, this article is using both ɰ and w̜, in different places. Shouldn't we pick one, whichever one, and use it? 24.159.255.29 20:59, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

FWIW, Extended IPA has a diacritic for "open-rounding", a superscript <œ>, which I believe might also be appropriate here: /ɰ^œ/. (Or is that "open" as in "open vowel"?) --Tropylium 20:55, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Approximate English vowels

Japanese vowels can be approximated in English as follows:

/a/ between cap and cup

/i/ as in fit

/u/ as in cook

/e/ as in get

/o/ as in dog (British English)

The above was deleted from the main page without being moved onto the talk page. I think they're more or less all dialect-independent and short vowels, except "dog" which doesn't have a close equivalent in American English. I suggest putting these back in. --DannyWilde 03:54, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

There's always a dialect you didn't consider when designing these. Here, New Zealand, South African, some northern English and/or Scottish (as I understand it) are some I can think of that won't work with these. Further, many colloquial varieties of English often use a centralised vowel in cook; for some of them, boot might be nearer anyway. You might say "but they can just look at the IPA transcriptions", but so can anyone (and the diagram), and get a more accurate understanding as well. Also, British English dog is quite a bit more open than the Japanese vowel. If you want a non-technical description, provide recordings of a Japanese speaker saying the Japanese vowels, and let the reader make their own conclusions about what's closer. —Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 07:59, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

I'd guess most of those speakers would be familiar with, let's say, so-called "British English", though. As for making a recording, I don't know how to do it unfortunately. Until there is a recording, why not keep these? --DannyWilde 10:54, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

There's also, I think, some American dialects that will have trouble with the descriptions (the Northern Cities/Great Lakes area in particular, I think, but various others exist). As for whether the speakers are familiar with other dialects, I'm not sure how reliable that is particularly when expressly stating one dialect and not the others (for instance, it'd be reasonable to assume that the variation in Japanese is equal to or greater than the variance in English); and speakers knowledge of the pronunciation of vowels in different dialects will of course vary (frex, I don't think of my STRUT as being particularly different from British, but mine is almost exactly the vowel intended anyway, whereas between cup and cap will probably get me some weird, contorted and undesirable vowel). Anyway, this is an encyclopædia article and not a tutorial. Also, it seems only fair that if we include a list of approximations in English, we should do that to for French and Dyirbal (the audience is not just English-native, but also EFL who don't necessarily have as extensive an article on Japanese in their own Wikipedia).

To make a recording, you get a speaker (native or with an indistinguishable-from-native accent), a digital recording device (e.g. computer+mike, high-quality MP3 player with record). Record them saying it, then upload the file to the Wikimedia Commons, then make a link to it. There's some pseudo-instructions at Wikipedia:Media, or if you get that far and can't work it out, give me a yell.

—Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 12:47, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

I don't have such a device. Why can't you do it? --DannyWilde 00:58, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

I don't have a native speaker :) (I assumed you did, or at least a good-enough accent, when you said you didn't know how to; if I'm wrong, I apologise.) (—Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ))

Sorry, I really don't have any equipment. I have some native speakers, though, so I'll try to get some recordings made at some point. --DannyWilde 03:33, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

My idea to resolve this conflict is to make a table of "approximate vowels" with a heading for each dialect. I've added the British ones, and the American "go" and others can add the other ones. --DannyWilde 00:58, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

I'm still not sure of what advantage it offers. It's not encyclopedic. It'd go down very nicely in the Japanese Wikibook, though. —Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 01:13, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

The technical level of the "Japanese phonology" article is very high, representing a lot of skill and knowledge, so I understand that putting this kind of "approximately" table does not exactly fit with the other contents. However, I have taken into account your opinion about problems with dialects and other languages, and I also think that for some people, who don't know a lot about phonology, this table will be the most useful and understandable part of the page. I hope the current form is at least tolerable to a majority of editors and readers. --DannyWilde 03:33, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

I'm not keen in general on this sort of thing, for essentially the same reasons as Felix the Cassowary. But, if you really want it, could you refer to Received Pronunciation rather than the vague and general term British English? I'm not very familiar with Japanese, but I have heard its /a/, and it's really got nothing whatsoever to do with the vowel that I (a British native speaker of English) use in cup (though cap is very close). The same sort of thing probably applies to American English, though someone more familiar with that will know the details.--JHJ 12:13, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

I don't have any objective way to measure which of the vowels in "cup" or "cap" is nearer to the Japanese vowel in "kappu", but it might be worth noting that when transcribing English to Japanese, the vowel in cap is often transcribed using a yōon, as in "kyatto" (Japanese version of "cat"), whereas the transcription of "cut" in Japanese is just "katto". Japanese people find it very hard to tell the difference between these two sounds and katakana versions of English words use the Japanese a for both. I've been listening to Japanese people saying Japanese "a" every day for twelve or so years, and my own guess is that the Japanese vowel is actually closer to "cup" than "cap". But, as I said, I have no objective way to measure it. Thank you for your edits to the page. Please feel free to improve it in any way you can. --DannyWilde 05:24, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

My point is really that these vowels (the ones in cap and cup) are quite variable across English accents, which is why I think descriptions like this should be clear about which variety of English they're referring to. If you speak RP, then your description makes sense, but here (northern England) most people have a vowel in cup that is probably closer to a Japanese /o/ or even /u/ than an /a/. (See foot-strut split.) I've seen far too many descriptions of vowels in non-English languages as "like English cup" or similar, when they invariably turn out to be some [a]-like vowel that sounds to me like the vowel of cap. --JHJ 16:35, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

This is a difficult issue; I would say that only one out of the five English sounds suggested above (e as in "get") is really the closest match to the Japanese sound in what we North Americans like to call a "neutral" accent. In fact in Japanese language textbooks and websites I've only once seen this particular collection of sounds suggested as the best approximate equivalents (I remember since it seemed so unusual). 221.189.192.63 20:03, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

touou wo oou

This doesn't seem particularly unnatural to me, although I'm not a native speaker. Would you like me to check it with some native speakers? I can easily ask people. Anyway remove it if it's upsetting you, but I thought it was rather a good example of the process described. --DannyWilde 08:38, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

well, it is a possible utterance, but not something that anyone would expect to hear. I put it there because it was fun for me. The example is from Akamatsu (1997). There is a similar example in Bloch (1950) "let's cover the tail" (ō wo ōo). Bloch says "Such an oddity is of course not intelligible to Japanese speakers at first hearing; but when it has been explained to them, they can both understand and repeat it." I think Akamatsu was just trying top Bloch with 7 vowels (over Bloch's 6). If you ask a native speaker, they will probably be amused. It's not serious: you can take it out. – ishwar  (speak) 16:29, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

It wasn't me who edited it, sorry I don't remember the user name, but someone edited it and put a comment "this is unnatural". As for being un-understandable, if you went up to your average English native speaker and said "Let's cover the tail" or "Cover Eastern Europe", you might get some funny looks - taking anything out of context no one will understand it. --DannyWilde 22:31, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

There's an important difference though: if you say to someone "Cover eastern Europe" they might give you odd looks, but primarily because they do understand what you're saying. Whereas the Japanese version is unintelligble. The fact that people "get it" when explained doesn't change that - the fact that it has to be explained means that it's unintelligible. Shinobu 11:01, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

what palatal fricative?

Doesn't sound like it... hito/ → [çit̥o] hito 人 'person' sounds like h to me -Iopq 03:54, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Just as hu in japanese is pronounced as [ʍɯ] or even (rarely) [fɯ], so the h in hi is altered by the vowel which follows it to [ç]. Tomer^talk 04:48, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

I thought it was [ɸɯ] for /hu/ -Iopq 01:44, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

Iopq's right. I have never seen [fɯ], much less [ʍɯ], in the literature, nor have I ever heard them.

However, please remember that what you hear is not always what someone said, and this is especially true across languages. (I remember the first time I heard a Fijian say [β], and I thought for all the world it was [v].) Godfrey Daniel 21:11, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

I listened to some people pronounce it carefully and I can definitely say that some pronounce it [h] and some pronounce it [ç]. It was in an anime and the title of a corporation is "Asahi". Some people said [asaçi] and others said [asahi]. It seems the same person would say it the same way so it's not just free variation in terms of strength of articulation. I am going to go to a library and research this issue. -Iopq 20:17, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Phonetically long vowels

The article has written:

Phonetically long vowels, then, are treated as a sequence of two identical vowels, i.e. ojiisan is /ojiisaɴ/ not /ojiːsaɴ/

and then lists /ɡjooza/ → [ɡʲoːza] and /seesaɴ/ → [seːsãɴ]. Is there some reason that these two are treated differently than /ii/?  freshgavinΓΛĿЌ  14:05, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Look at your brackets. In the first example we've got a phonemic analysis where as the second is a phonetic analysis. When IPA/SAMPA or whatever your prefer is put into /brackets/ we are considering the underlying phonology, and as most analyses treat Japanese long vowels and underlying double vowels, i.e. /ii/ not /iː/, we would write /ojiisaɴ/. In [brackets] we are looking at the surface realizations, and since most of the time Japanese people say [ojiːsaɴ] that is what we write. The phonemic analysis of [ɡʲoːza] is as you wrote above /ɡjooza/. /ii/ doesn't get treated any different, the article just doesn't write out the phonetic analysis, i.e. [ojiːsaɴ]. 130.253.135.181 (talk) 19:49, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

Nasal vowel

I heard ichi man en as icɕimãẽɴ how does this conform to the moraic nasal section?

That sounds like a simplification (or over-simplification) of very fast speech to me. Even when it's not fully formed the nasal qualities of the mora still exist to a small degree.  freshgavinΓΛĿЌ  12:06, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

That's true, but I don't know how to write morae in IPA. Plus, it seems that a lot of the time in very brisk speech ɴ doesn't count as a mora. You can tell this from songs because when the song requires two syllables a word could be sung as "shunkan" if you need three syllables it could be sung as "shunkaN" and when you need four it could be sung as "shuNkaN." I don't know if that's relevant because lots of crap in songs has nothing to with the language. -Iopq 13:04, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

That's true : ). Modern Japanese music (especially rap) tends to English-ize a lot of the sounds, one of the most interesting being sounds like /naku/, pronounced instead as something like [næk]. I'd still argue that in general, /n/ gets it's own mora in most Japanese music, though. Even though you can interpret "shunkan" as 2 syllables, that doesn't mean there're only 2 morae; it's not the same thing. In fact, you could say the whole idea of "syllables" don't exist in Japanese at all.  freshgavinΓΛĿЌ  03:37, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

According to the research I've done and observations I've made, mora nasals never get lost, but non-native speakers may miss them. In fact, I believe a more accurate transcription of relaxed-speech 一万円 (in isolation) would be something like [itʲɕimãə̃ẽə̃] or even [itʲɕimããẽẽ], where there's one more nasalized vowel between the a of 万 and the e of 円. (BTW, I don't believe that the affricate is fully palatal, but that's perhaps a matter of taste.)

ん always gets counted as a mora. However, as Freshgavin pointed out, syllables and moras aren't the same. However, I believe both are necessary for an accurate description of Japanese. For example, the location of (pitch) accent in a verb can best be described by incorporating the syllable, whereas without it, you have to explain the seemingly-abberant accent in káeru in an unprincipled manner. Godfrey Daniel 21:06, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

L and R

I noticed that Japanese doesn't have an "l" or "r". Is that why some native Japanese speakers mix l and r when they speak English? I'm not trying to offend anyone here.Cameron Nedland 00:18, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

Though it's not the greatest article, check out Engrish, which explains a little bit. You basically answered your own question. In Japanese, there is no sound equivalent to the English "l" or "r" sound. Because of this—though it may sound suprising to a native English speaker—many Japanese lack the ability to reliably differenciate between the two sounds (the same applies for "v" and "b", and the many sounds symbolized by the letter "a").

The fact that many/most Japanese people don't generally think in roman letters, but instead in katakana (which, of course, lacks individual spellings for "r" and "l"), makes it difficult for them to remember which words are spelled with "r" and which with "l", even if they are among the minority who can pronounce them. I've copied this question to the Wikipedia:Reference desk/Language, which would be a good place to ask a general question like this in the future!  freshgavinΓΛĿЌ  00:28, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

OK sorry.Cameron Nedland 16:12, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

Actually, to an English speaker, the Japanese [r] sound can sound like an E [r], [l] and even [d]. To speak of one English [r] is itself absolutely ridiculous. So-called phonological discussions like these always get lost in phonetic detail. Phonology ought to be banned! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.213.96.153 (talk) 02:01, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Trubetskoy (a friend of Jakobson and originator of the concept 'the phoneme') identified two r/l phonemes in Japanese. One is the Japanese /r/ and the other is the Japanese palatal /r/. We can see 'distinctiveness' with the words 'rou' (candle) and 'ryou' (dormitory, although there are homophones with other meanings).

Question

The underlined part was recently added to this article:

The name of the pop group in the movie, Dezaato (i.e., Dessert), is purposely romanized differently throughout the movie: "Dessart", "Dessret" and "Desert". But when pronounced, it sounds close to the words "Death Threat."

I know that z is a popular replacer for th in transliteration, but when I try to pronounce the zaa part, it doesn't sound anywhere near "death threat". My question is that is z also pronounced something like th, so that dezaato sounds like "death threat"? I don't think so (since my first language is pronounced very similarly to Japanese and I'm somewhat familiar with Japanese pronunciation), but can anyone verify the claims of that sentence? --TonyM ^{ｷﾀ━( °∀° )━ｯ!!} 19:57, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

It seems like they're trying to find something where there isn't. I could imagine some logic if I assume that the person who thought of the tidbit was thinking along these lines:

• Dessert is traditionally transliterated to the Japanese phonetic system as "dezaato"
• Attempts by some Japanese to figure out the English spelling of "dezaato" are often haphazard
• One of these haphazard trials of spelling appears in the movie as "dessret"
• The English pronunciation of "dessret" once again fitted to the Japanese phonetic system would be "dessu retto"
• "Dessu retto" sounds very similar to the Japanese interpretation of the words "death threat", transliterated as "dessu suretto"

As you can see, this is a ridiculously complex sequence of events to assume without any source and thus should be quickly deleted from Wikipedian and forgotten forever.  freshofftheufoΓΛĿЌ  05:08, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

Thank you! --TonyM ^{ｷﾀ━( °∀° )━ｯ!!} 12:16, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

Desu

"desu is pronounced [desɯ̥]."

It might be just me, but I hear [des] very often. But then again, I'm getting used to the idea that voice actresses and pop stars speak a completely different language than textbook Japanese :-) Shinobu 11:05, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

It's probably better to not that the [ɯ̥] vowel is in general pronounced with a lighter stress than the other four, and it often shortened or omitted, especially at the end of a phrase/sentence. That would at least account for the half-pronunciation, and the way the mouth forms the sound even if it isn't pronounced.  freshofftheufoΓΛĿЌ  21:13, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

It's just an unvoiced vowel. That's pretty much all there is to it. -Iopq 00:00, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

So I was right after all. I know this kind of devoicing is common, but the statement above doesn't take it into account at all, leading the reader to believe devoicing for some reason shouldn't happen in desu. Given the rest of the article it's hard to see why the statement there at all, actually. Shinobu 08:20, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Of course you're not wrong, but if you were write that desu is pronounced [des] you wouldn't be entirely right either. I think it is necessary to say first what the basic, original, or "pure" form (whatever that means) is, and then explain how it is actually communicated in common speach.  freshofftheufoΓΛĿЌ  15:47, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

The [ɯ̥] vowel in desu and masu is occasionally also voiced. The most commom pronunciation is as an unvoiced vowel, but because native Japanese speakers can choose freely to voice the vowel without a change in the meaning of the word, it is clear that the way the word is conceived by Japanese speakers is as [desɯ̥], not [des]. This, again, connects to the discussion below about phonetics vs. phonemics. 61.11.175.151 01:27, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

There's something that I've been wondering about "desu" and "arimasu": while I fully understand that the "u" of "desu" often does get devoiced, as with "arimasu", it seems to me that there may be a reanalysis of it as simply "des" and "arimas." By this I mean that I have sometimes heard something like [arimasŋa] in phrases like ペンがありますが、鉛筆がありません。 It may be that it is still devoiced, but I don't always hear a fully voiced "u" like I would expect. Has anyone else noticed this or am I just crazy? 130.253.135.181 (talk) 19:59, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

Why would you expect a voiced /u/ in this case? Just because it's not utterance-final? Nah, there's no reanalysis here. The so-called devoicing rule happens (among other places) at the end of words, as it is even if followed by [ŋa]. There is good reason to believe that those /u/s very much exist in speaker's brains. Djiann (talk) 20:08, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

conflict with N (kana)

See Talk:N (kana) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Spacecat2 (talk • contribs) 00:44, 15 February 2007 (UTC).

Phonetic versus Phonemic

The chart at the top of the page is rather confused about whether it is dealing with phonetics or phonemics. In the conservative phonology (which is what the article mainly seems to be dealing with) f and h are allophones, and the velar approximate is an allophone of u. These should not be listed seperately. Or alternatively if we want to go with phonetic than Q and N should be removed and the various realizations of N should be added. Tibetologist 01:31, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Also, another inconsistency appears to be listing [ts dz], but not [ɕ ʑ] in the consonant table. Any particular reason? --Tropylium 21:04, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Boldly added these. AIUI a /P/ separate from /h/, and postalveolars n' stuff are sometimes posited for modern Japanese, so it's some sort of "maximal phonemic" inventory.--Tropylium (talk) 20:32, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

The body of the text seems fairly confused, too, unless my understanding of japanese phonology is completely off. While つき　may be realized as something along the lines of [ʨɯki], it's placed in angled brackets as /tsuki/, when by my understanding if we're using angled brackets it should be /tɯki/. Am I just missing something here? 24.16.13.49 (talk) 21:50, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

I think that the article should more clearly distinguish between the conservative (older) phonemic inventory (perhaps noting some of the more abstract analyses) and the innovative (and larger) inventory of younger speakers. Some readers may not be clear on why a word like tsuki might be /tuki/ in the conservative phonology (as often transcribed in ling literature) and as /tsuki/ in the innovative varieties (the phonetics of both being essentially the same for this word). And, of course, loanword phonology in borrowings should be noted paying attention to how they are represented in the different phonologies. I suggest that this is best explained with two different consonant tables that contain only the underlying contrastive segments for each inventory. Currently, the article is not so explicit about this and probably confusing. We should present them both and note the differences (as as Vance does). – ishwar  (speak) 19:08, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

I believe the Handbook of the IPA endorses more of the newer analysis. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 03:22, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

It has /ts/ but not /dz/, and /ɴ/, not /N/. kwami (talk) 02:56, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Okay, I've cleaned this up a bit, as it was highly POV, but I did a very quick job as it's way past my bedtime. kwami (talk) 08:31, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

I noticed in your changes you changed ɯ to u͍. I wouldn't mind this so much if ͍ showed up correctly. I say we go back to ɯ (and ɰ. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 19:31, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

It doesn't show up for you even with the IPA template? Oh well. The problem is that ɯ is just as wrong as u. It has the advantage of alerting the reader that this is not the same as English oo, but has the disadvantage of teaching ɯ incorrectly. Can you think of any way to write this that shows up properly and isn't factually incorrect? kwami (talk) 22:06, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

It doesn't show up unless I copy it into a search box. I'm not sure of a proper way, though the compressed vowel articles say that there's no official way to do it. What does scholarship generally use? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 22:41, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

/u/ is pretty close to universal. The article in the IPA Handbook uses that, but then approximates it phonetically as either [u̹] or [ɯ̜]. I don't like either, because the difference isn't quantity of rounding, but quality, and people are uncertain enough about the IPA as it is. All phonetic transcriptions are factually incorrect, unless you want to use a placeholder symbol like [u*], or some ad hoc approximation. I'm not sure if the labial-spreading diacritic is correct either—since it's from the ExtIPA I've never seen an example in use,—but at least a "spread-rounded vowel" is somewhere in the ballpark. But if it doesn't show up when you force the font display (or maybe even if you don't)... kwami (talk) 23:36, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

Alternate Realization of the Japanese R

I want to bring up that, on occasion, and mostly for intoning purposes, the post-alveolar flap in Japanese is realised as a trill. While this is not a distinct phoneme in the sense that it is meaningfully indistinct from the normal R sound, it is definitely a distinct consonant sound that appears in natural Japanese speech. Perhaps this article should be edited to include this. Depending on the person's personality, it can happen quite often.

This, however, also falls under the question below about phonetics versus phonemics in the article. Amieni 06:51, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

You're absolutely correct. This phenomenon is called 巻き舌 makijita in Japanese, and is often seen (heard? :) in movies etc. to bring out that yakuza flavor to speech. The Kansai region is a particularly good example of this, whatwith the ahondarrrra korrrra ahondarrrrra... Perhaps it is indeed worth including. 89.27.11.236 (talk) 20:26, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Yes, definitely. Phonology includes phonetics, though perhaps we'd want it in the Japanese language article. kwami (talk) 00:25, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

Well, I added it into consonant processes, since that's what it really is. 89.27.11.236 (talk) 09:26, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

While we are on the topic, we might also discuss the fact that another variation of Japanese r is palatalized. In classic structuralist terms, it DOES CREATE A CONTRAST. For example, 'rou' (candle) vs. 'ryou' (dormitory). The article's chart of consonant phonemes does include a palatal r but the discussion doesn't explain it.

Anyone? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 12:13, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

Total number of possible syllables

The Vietnamese phonology article mentions that Vietnamese has (including tones) a total inventory of c. 6,200 syllables. Can we get a similar figure for this article? Apparently Japanese has, in contrast, a few hundred possible syllables. Badagnani (talk) 03:10, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

14 initial consonants (including the possibility "none" but excluding /j/ as the next item deals with that)
2 possibilities for presence or absence of /j/ after initial consonant (or absence thereof)
5 vowels
3 possibilities for final consonant (none, N, Q)

14 x 2 x 5 x 3 = 420. 91.105.50.198 (talk) 23:32, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

That doesn't make much sense to me. Leaving aside the fact that N is its own syllable, many of the above combinations are not possible in Japanese. /j/ is not possible after all consonants, and when it is, it only combines with three of the five vowels. You're probably better off just counting the squares on a kana chart. Paul Davidson (talk) 01:17, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

/ɴ/ is its own mora, not syllable. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 01:32, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Can we say that the Japanese phonetic system allows for a total inventory of 420 possible syllables, of which 102 are actually used? Badagnani (talk) 05:21, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

It seems improper to say that when the article goes out of its way to say that Japanese is a language of moras and not of syllables. Total possible moras would be what we'd want to put out. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 05:35, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

The thing is, these are different criteria. When comparing to other languages, it's appropriate to use syllables. Thus, my question stands, as I think it's relevant and important to give this total number. Badagnani (talk) 06:11, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

What is "possible" supposed to mean? What's possible is what's used, unless there happen to be some gaps. kwami (talk) 23:11, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

It means that for a given initial consonant and final vowel, there is no actual syllable used in any word in that language, although it would seem to be possible. This is found, for example, in Mandarin and Vietnamese for certain syllables that don't have characters pronounced with a given tone. In Japanese, this would mean that, for example, there were syllables such as ka, ke, kei, ki, ko, kou, ku, kuu, etc., but one of those doesn't have any word in Japanese that actually uses that syllable. I presume there is at least one case of this in Japanese, as there are in other East Asian languages. Badagnani (talk) 23:35, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

"Placeless"?

What are these "Placeless"? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 189.30.251.151 (talk) 15:41, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

No specified place of articulation. kwami (talk) 08:30, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Katakana letter ヴ and [v], イェ and [je]

Is there any influence of letter ヴ on the Japanese phonology. It's meant to render foreign [v] but often pronounced as [b], anyway by the Japanese people. Some foreign names may be rendered with either ヴァ, ヴィ, ヴゥ, ヴェ, ヴォ　or バ, ビ, ブ, ベ, ボ. In the first case, is it then pronounced by native speakers as [v], [b] or [w]?

ヴィ is pronounced /bui/ by most Japanese. It is not a separate phoneme. kwami (talk) 23:08, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Another question: when イェ is used to render [je] (as in "yes"). Then is it pronounced as [je] or [e] or [ie], e.g. イェール (Yale)? Atitarev (talk) 22:53, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, Kwamikagami. You are saying ヴィ is pronounced /bui/ by most Japanese. It's not even /bi/ but /bui/, is that right? I need to confirm but a Japanese person told me that some people who speak foreign languages they pronounce ヴィ as "vi" in a personal name, e.g. they say "Kevin" as Kevin (ケヴィン), not Kebin or Kebuin, not sure about media people. How consistent is this? I would appreciate some online source if you can find (can be in Japanese). 宜しくお願いします！ --Atitarev (talk) 23:39, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Most people pronounce 'bi'. I pronounce 'vi' and 'bi' both. It depends. If a native speaker pronounces V as 'vi' all the time, he/she is thought as a snob. The difference between B and V is not important in Japanese language. There's no V sound in Japanese, you know. Oda Mari (talk) 15:06, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

When we refer to the alphabet V, we pronounce 'bui' or 'vi'. But V in a word is 'bi'. Like ルイ・ビトン. Oda Mari (talk) 15:38, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes, Oda's right, of course. I was thinking of the pronunciation of the letter V. And the [v] variation only occurs for people who've learned to pronounce it. It's kinda like English speakers using a French R in French words—some people might do it, but many are unable to, and you can hardly say it's an English sound. I don't know the percentage of Japanese who can pronounce a [v], but it's certainly not everyone, especially among people who don't know English. kwami (talk) 17:50, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, all. So, [v] can't be mentioned as a peripheral sound in Japanese? How about my second question - イェ? Is it pronounced as "ye"? --Atitarev (talk) 20:16, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Japanese doesn't distinguish between /e/ and /je/, except again in foreign borrowings. I would assume that イェ is pronounced /ie/ by people who have not acquired the distinction from, say, English, but I could be wrong. kwami (talk) 20:54, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Thank you both, I owe you. If you are ever interested in Russian or have a question about it, talk to me, I'll try to help you. --Atitarev (talk) 22:41, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. kwami (talk) 22:59, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Add dakuten mora to consonant table

Could someone add the dakuten and handakuten consonants to the chart? I don't have the linguistic background to do it myself. Wikky Horse (talk) 04:13, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Palatal n

At 19:42, 14 July 2009, Aeusoes1 made several edits to this article for the reason, "some cleanup; rm tangential orthography information." Unfortunately, included in what was removed was documentation of the usage of ɲ in Japanese:

に

[ɲi]

Is there a way to restore this information to the page without reintroducing the dreaded "tangential orthography information"? -- Meyer (talk) 06:02, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

Actually, all that's been removed is the symbol <ɲ>. If you look at the Palatalization and affrication section, you'll see that now [n̠ʲ] is used to represent that same sound. This, along with the removal of ɲ from WP:IPA for Japanese was done by Kwami. Is it really that important to make a graphical distinction between alveolopalatal and palatal nasal? It's not a distinction made for Catalan or Polish despite those languages having alveolopalatal nasals. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 06:35, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

We also don't transcribe /m/ or /k/ as palatalized before /i/ (except in detailed cases such as the phonology article), and as I was going through the articles that used the IPA-ja template, I noticed that none of them had <ɲ>.

Ƶ§œš¹, maybe you can help me clean up at palatal nasal which languages have simple palatals, which have palatalized palatals (palatal offglide), and which have palatalized postalveolars? kwami (talk) 11:34, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

I think I've already done that. When I get a chance, I'll go through the examples that are sourced and make sure.

[n̠ʲ] makes sense, but have you seen it used in literature? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 17:13, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

Not that I recall. I was just following our phonology article. kwami (talk) 22:09, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

After a quick look at the articles that use the IPA-ja template, it seems that there's only three opportunities to use the palatal nasal (anime, Nissan, and Mount Nishigatake). That's few enough that we can change them easily to what we think it ought to be. While palatalization of non-coronals is unnecessary, it seems more consistent to indicate the palatalization of the alveolar/dental nasal since we do that with s, t, z, and d. The change is just as significant and I suspect that the main reason editors haven't used it is because it's not normally indicated in common romanization systems. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 03:48, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

To an English speaker, at least, the difference is insignificant. It simply sounds like the vowel, and I don't see how it's any more relevant than palatalization of /ki/ or /mi/. The accoustic effect of /si/, however, is highly salient, and /zi, ti, di/ even change their manner of articulation. There's nothing comparable in /ni/. I would advocate distinguishing [ɽa, ɾi, ɺo] before bothering with [nʲi]. kwami (talk) 11:43, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

Palatalization of /ki/ and /mi/ is what you'd expect with a consonant before /i/ and if it were just a palatalized alveolar I'd agree with you. But we don't limit ourselves in the other IPA guides to allophony that English speakers are likely to perceive. The [ɣ] of Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan; the length mark in Italian; the intervocalic voicing of voiceless stops in Mandarin; and central high vowels ([ɨ ʉ]) in Russian are arguably imperceptable to English speakers, but they're still considered important enough to put in our IPA guides. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 17:20, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia:IPA for Japanese Link

Since WP:MOS-JP calls for Hepburn romanization of Japanese words used in WP articles, I changed the wording of the link to WP:IPA for Japanese so as not to imply that IPA should be used to represent Japanese in WP articles. -- Meyer (talk) 06:38, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

We wouldn't have WP:IPA for Japanese if IPA transcriptions of Japanese was prohibited or discouraged. WP:MOS-JP says that Hepburn should be used when one wishes to romanize, not that IPA can't or shouldn't be used. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 09:33, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

WP:MOS-JP specifies only a single method for representing Japanese (other than Japanese text itself): Hepburn romanization. While other representations aren't forbidden, neither are they encouraged. Stylistically, standardizing on one representation produces better results for the project, reduces editing effort, and avoids my-representation-is-better-than-yours crusades. Therefore, the wording of the link, encouraging use of IPA in Japanese articles, is inappropriate. I don't have anything against IPA, and adopting it as the standard representation has some merits, but the switch-over would also entail some costs. It should be well-discussed in WP:WikiProject Japan before being encouraged. -- Meyer (talk) 11:47, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

Yes, one of the justifications for Hepburn Romanization is that it does a good job of indicating pronunciation. Perhaps we can change the wording so that it's clear that WP:IPA for Japanese is only for IPA transcriptions in Wikipedia articles (because it is) but that Hepburn Romanization is preferred. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 17:09, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

I don't see why it would be preferred. In an article on a Japanese topic that contains numerous Japanese words, sure, but not if we wish to convey pronunciation. Jyutping also does a fine job conveying the pronunciation of Cantonese; there's the Royal system for Thai, etc; in languages like Vietnamese that have phonemic orthographies we still include the IPA, and we can't expect our readers to be familiar with our choice of romanization for every language of the world. Therefore, if what we wish to convey is the pronunciation, rather than simply the identity of the word, Hepburn is *dis*preferred; only the IPA is universal. kwami (talk) 22:07, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

Since there are over 80 articles that link to (i.e. use) WP:IPA for Japanese, it seems that some people feel that the romanization system isn't enough. We are talking about English speakers who are likely to pronounce geisha as [ˈɡaɪʃə]. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 03:40, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

Interesting idea I got from a book

It seems you can actually treat Japanese and Sino-Japanese phonology in a different way.

Vowels = a u e o

Y + Vowel = ya yu ye(i) yo

this way you can say that ye is pronounced i and combines with consonants the same way ya yu and yo do

s + ya = sha s + yu = shu s + yo = sho s + ye = shi (because ye is pronounced i)

This stems from the fact that i always palatalizes, while e never does so there is no overlap between the two

so the Japanese syllable table could be written with four columns and the y row will be all filled

the writing system does not accomodate this though -Iopq 07:08, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

>>This stems from the fact that i always palatalizes, while e never does so there is no overlap between the two<<

Not true in actual spoken Japanese in some dialects. There is plenty of overlap between J /e/ and /i/. The fact that [je] could assimilate or change to [ji] or [ii] ought to tell you that. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 02:27, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

Voicing of H produces B?

Why is B/P the voiced version of H when it makes more sense for it to be the voiced version of M?

Adding dakuten is supposed to change voicing only; movement of the teeth, toungue, and lips stay the same (or so I've learned). This works perfectly fine for K->G, S->Z, T->D (し,ち have different pronunciations, yet じ/ぢ are pronounced the same. Same with す,つ->ず/づ. ち->ぢ and す->ず are fine. I know づ was once 'dzu', but that seems to have gotten lost. Not sure on じ. The tongue doesn't touch the roof of the mouth when pronouncing 'shi' but it does for 'chi' and 'ji'.), and even W->V in katakana (assuming V is pronounced V and not B. [Interestingly, unicode characters exist for ヷ, ヸ, ヹ, and ヺ, though they don't really display properly]). Then there's H->B/P. Lips don't touch together when pronouncing H, but they do when pronouncing B/P. Comparing with the remaining unvoiced consonants N, M, Y, and R, M is the one that has the same mouth movements as B/P.

Another thing is the different pronunciations of ん. ex: /n/ before T/D/N, /ŋ/ before K/G, /m/ before M/B/P. D is voiced T, G is voiced K, but B isn't voiced M, which it might seem to be.

150.210.226.38 (talk) 22:25, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

This is a historical derivation. For example, in English, /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ are the "long" versions of /ɪ/ and /ʌ/. This is because historically they were *ī *ū versus *i *u in Old English; subsequent sound changes affected long vowels to a greater extent than short vowels. (Compare Old English cū "cow" vs. cuppe "cup".) Japanese /h/ is historically *p. 16th century Portuguese sources record it as [f] (halfway between [p] and [h]), and Chinese words beginning or ending in [p] are spelled out in Japanese with the kana of the /h/ series (Chinese /pan/ → Japanese /han/, Chinese /tep/ → Japanese /tehu/ → post-WWII /tyou/), suggesting at the time that /h/ was still pronounced as a [p]. Modern Japanese /pp/ is the doubled homologue of /h/ (e.g. hatu-ha contracts to happa), while /b/ is the voiced homologue of this historical /p/.

Oh, and these still are [p] is some "dialects" of Japanese (actually separate but closely related languages). For example, in Yaeyama, "boat" is [puni] instead of /hune/, and "dove" is [patu] instead of /hato/. It is thought that these were historically *pune and *pato. kwami (talk) 23:09, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

There seems to be some sort of morpho-phonemic alternation of J h, b and w. Take for example the morpheme 'hara' (field, 原）. In place names, it could be pronounced 'hara', 'bara' and 'wara'. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 12:16, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

Archiving

This talk page is long and promises to get longer. MiszaBot's instructions ask me to get your agreement before asking it to handle all this automatically. So, would it be OK to get MiszaBot to archive? -- Hoary (talk) 10:13, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

We've had this talk page 4 years, and yet this last "discussion" takes up half the page. I doubt we're likely to get things like that often, so I doubt there's any need for automated archiving. We could archive manually after this is over, and then let it sit for another four years. I don't object exactly, just don't see the point. — kwami (talk) 11:25, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

I've archived half the content of this page. -- Hoary (talk) 14:40, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

Removals of comments

There've been several removals of comments hereabouts, some even citing vandalism.

I hereby waive any right (?) to be treated "civilly". Please don't remove any comment because it's incidentally impolite to or about me. The requirement of civility is rather a bore, and I think that we can assume that anybody at Talk:Japanese phonology (unlike, say, those at Talk:Ashlee Simpson) will have a mental age of 14+ and will thus be unfazed by the odd bit of criticism. -- Hoary (talk) 14:09, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

I'm sure you can handle it. But even your good-humored comebacks, when there gets to be pages of them, are inappropriate: Talk pages are for improving the article, not for trolling or playing games. Personal attacks and other such nonsense should be deleted, so that readers coming here see a page discussing the article, not ourselves. — kwami (talk) 14:30, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

• Incivility and personal attacks create a hostile editing environment for all concerned, and should be avoided no matter who the specific target is Please do not comment on other contributors, focus instead on the editorial content of the article. Generally, it's inappropriate to remove the comments of others on any talk page other than your own user talk page, per WP:NPA Removal of text. Only truly egregious attacks should be removed, and it would be wise to seek assistance from an admin instead of removing them yourself. Dreadstar ☥ 19:21, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

Moraic obstruent

This is an inadequate treatment of the phenomenon, to say the least--actually it's rather quaint in its adherence to archi-phonemes, etc.

Without discussing the glottal aspects of this/these sounds, you can't really make much sense of them. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 12:08, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

So go ahead and improve it. -- Hoary (talk) 12:35, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

By what criteria would any improvements be judged? Someone from Romania talked to someone in Tokyo and got them to read a sentence out loud? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 13:10, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

Well, life is a bitch. So what are you going to do about it? If you really believe that editing Wikipedia is a hopeless enterprise, it's hard for me to understand why you're spending your time here. Briefly, the sensible options would seem to be (i) writing well and persuasively, and (ii) spending your time on some other website (or indeed "real life") instead. -- Hoary (talk) 13:21, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

The immediate above comment has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the moraic obstruent and the inadequate explanation of it in the article. After addressing diphthongs, I will return to this, because it participates in some very interesting aspects of Japanese language and deserves better, more detailed sourced explanation. 133.7.7.240 (talk) 08:21, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

I look forward to your improved explanation. -- Hoary (talk) 10:50, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

As an aside, from Yuko Yoshida, "Licensing to let", in Living on the edge (Kaye & Ploch eds, 2003), p 456ff,

Aim of paper: "that /N/, the so-called "moraic nasal" [...] should not be treated as a consonant [...] but instead involves a nuclear position"

"In many cases, "bimoraic" Sino-words comprise a diphthong or a long vowel, with an optional consonant preceding it, and the second vowel of those vowel sequences is avoided for accent assignment."

[Note: she calls them both 'diphthongs' and 'sequences']

When accented, 145 of 177 accented "Sino-words" (kanji) are stressed on mora 1. Said to reflect that in Chinese this "is the head of the word-domain. This headship manifests itself in Japanese in terms of pitch accent. [...] the headship on N1 [mora 1] is inherited from the original language Ancient Chinese, and thus N2 does not have to fulfil the conditions [...] to be the head of that domain unless N2 receives an accent via a specific process such as the case seen in numbers".

Transcribes /VN/ as [Vɯ̃] which, given that there's no IPA symbol for Japanese /u/, sounds reasonable, though there may be allophonic lip closure. If we take this to be a nasal vowel, then depending on which sequences are "diphthongs", we might have nasal diphthongs in J.

Note: French nasal vowels borrowed as /VN/, in contrast to French /Vn/, which is borrowed as /Vnu/. — kwami (talk) 11:07, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

Bibliography

As noted above, I've just now commented out every item in the bibliography that isn't explicitly cited from within the article. -- Hoary (talk) 11:08, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

I've taken the commented out items and put them in a separate "further reading" section. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 17:40, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

What is wiki style on this? Further Reading or Suggested Reading? Some styles would have a works cited list followed by a more expansive bibliography. It's these sorts of things that scholars expect and benefit from. I'll defer to the experts on wiki as to what the wiki style is.133.7.7.240 (talk) 02:44, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

"WP:MOS" probably explains. I'm no expert, but I'd use "Further reading" if only because "Suggested reading" seems to suggest value judgements. (Well of course either way there are value judgements involved, but one can choose whether or not to remind the reader of this.) -- Hoary (talk) 07:39, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

erroneous explanation of vowels

[ed. note: large parts of this discussion that were personal attacks or other nonsense have been deleted. — kwami (talk)]

this discussion has been bowdlerized by kwami to make himself look good. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 11:14, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

Your ability to mindread is impressive. -- Hoary (talk) 12:41, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

Your ability to read, such as it is, isn't. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 13:49, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

The article vowel section states:

Japanese has 5 vowels:

The Japanese vowels are pronounced as monophthongs, unlike in English; except for /u/, they are similar to their Spanish or Italian counterparts.

Except that you can descriptively augment the vowel total with diphthongs like 'ai', 'au' and 'oi'--as well as 'ae'. If English vowel inventories include such diphthongs, why not Japanese? They are central to speaking the language and saying its vocabulary, and people who are learning Japanese would be misinformed to think they need to learn '5 monophthongs'. Totally bogus structuralist 'urban legend' nonsense. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 12:23, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

This is the dominant interpretation by linguists. If you've got other sources that says Japanese has phonemic diphthongs, bring them to the table. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 16:48, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

133.7.7.240, Japanese vowel sequences may sound to you as diphthongs, but they are not. They are just vowel sequences. One simple demonstration is that in Japanese absolutely any vowel can be followed by absolutely any other vowel, which does not happen in English. Native Japanese speakers don't perceive vowel sequences as units, while on the contrary English native speakers cannot normally separate diphthongs into their vowel components.

Like Aeusoes says, if you do have sources stating that Japanese has diphthongs (which I strongly doubt), you are welcome add that in the article. — AdiJapan 16:54, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

For example, take a place name like 'Sabae'. The final vowel sequence as pronounced by many Japanese is so clearly a diphthong. They do not say a plus e. They say a sound that brings the two together as a unified sound.

I would say that 'ai', 'au', 'oi', and 'ae' are all diphthongs in spoken Japanese and not just double vowel sequences. But at any rate, [1]

2. DIPHTHONGS

Diphthongs refer to a tautosyllabic sequence of two vowels of different qualities. One question that always arises when we discuss this type of vowel is where we can draw a line between `diphthongs' as defined in this way and heterosyllabic vowel sequences, or sequences of any two vowels that occur across a syllable boundary. At least three criteria are used for the definition of diphthongs in general, one being morphological and the other two phonological. The morphological criterion is that two vocalic elements must be within a morpheme rather than across two morphemes in order to form a diphthong. Thus [ai] in the word /ai/ `love' is entitled to form a diphthong, whereas [ai] in the compound noun /ha+isya/ `tooth, doctor; dentist' is not. Of the two phonological criteria, one concerns the sonority of the two vowels in question. Given a sequence of two vowels, V1 and V2, V1 must be at least as sonorous as V2 to form a diphthong. Stated conversely, V1 and V2 belong to different syllables and do not form a diphthong if V2 is more sonorous than V1, e.g. [ia], [oa]. Potential exceptions to this are cases where the first vowel becomes a glide, e.g. [ia] → [ja], as well as cases where the second vowel becomes a schwa, e.g. [ia] → [i?]. The other phonological criterion is related to word accent and specifically applies to Japanese. The accent assigned to V2 by any quantity-sensitive accent rule usually shifts to V1 if the two vowels are within a single syllable, i.e., if they form a diphthong. This contrasts with the case where the accent assigned to V2 remains intact if the two vowels are across a syllable boundary. This interpretation is based on the general observation that accent falls on the nuclear vowel of the syllable, rather than on the mora originally designated as the accent locus by mora-counting accent rules (McCawley 1978, Kubozono 1999a). Although matters may be more complicated in some cases, the three criteria stated above seem to be sufficient when we discuss the two diphthongs [ai] and [au] in Japanese. Generally, both [ai] and [au] satisfy the two phonological requirements as long as the two vowels are within a single morpheme (see Note 5 below for some exceptional cases). Other vowel sequences such as [oi], [ei], [eu] and [ou] can also be interpreted as constituting a diphthong as long as they are tautomorphemic. [iu] and [ui] may be somewhat more ambiguous because their components, [i] and [u], are just as sonorous as each other. These vowel sequences must be tested by accent rules with respect to their syllabic status.

133.7.7.240 (ever consider registering?), although your personal attacks and "wiki-cursing" almost caused me to dismiss your post as so much hot air, I think the sources you cite and your basic point that five monophthongal vowels are not the end of the story are sound. Although the article already has more phonological detail than a general reader would care about, the sources you cite are enough to justify modifying the paragraph on vowels to acknowledge the existence of diphthongs in Japanese, though less common than in English. --Meyer (talk) 00:47, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

Simple sonority wouldn't do it, as then there would be no distinction between diphthongs and sequences, whereas there's an obvious difference between [iu], [ju], and [iw]. I'll have to read the refs for accent rules. I have, however, frequently read that Japanese vowel sequences commonly reduce to diphthongs in conversational speech; that would give Japanese phonetic diphthongs but not phonemic ones.

(I've often wondered if the moraic nature of Japanese were due to the writing system and poetic tradition rather than to anything inherent in Japanese.) — kwami (talk) 00:56, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

Wait, V1 must be more sonorous than V2? Nonsense. The author apparently doesn't know the difference between rising and falling diphthongs. I wonder if that's because there are no diphthongs in his language? — kwami (talk) 01:03, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

Being dismissive doesn't help advance the discussion, either, kwami. The author at least knows enough to get published in two linguistic works. If you are saying that the author's ideas are so flawed that the sources should be excluded, you should cite your own souces supporting that conclusion. Otherwise, I think at least a note acknowledging that some scholars believe Japanese has diphthongs is justified. --Meyer (talk) 02:28, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

I'm not being dismissive, I'm pointing out apparent errors. Once the errors are removed, is there enough left to support the thesis? There very well may be, but I can't tell that until I dismiss apparent strawmen. For example, I just read an argument that Japanese must have syllables because the antepenultimate-mora accent loan-word rule needs to be modified to account for syllables. However, in all examples given but one, the accent corresponds to the accent in the source language, and this potential contributing factor is never considered. (Also, the "rule" does not appear to be very productive to begin with, as lots and lots of loans violate it.) I'd like to see some statistics that divergences form the source-language accent are statistically unlikely if syllables are not taken into account. (The section on compounding is much more convincing, at least given his poor examples from borrowing.) There's also the assumption that if there are two vowels in a syllable, then they form a diphthong. I could make a similar argument with consonants, that if a stop+fricative occurs in a syllable onset or coda, they form an affricate, but I'd be wrong: Polish contrasts the two in that position. Is an analogous phenomenon possible with vowels? I don't know: Diphthongs are notoriously difficult to account for. Anyway, if the argument holds, it's not just for /au/ and /ai/, but also /oi/, /ei/ (= /e:/), /ou/ (= /o:/), /ae/, /ue/, /ui/, /iu/, /ao/, /uo/, etc.--quite a number of diphthongs! Anyway, I've only gotten a start on the refs, both so far by the same author. — kwami (talk) 04:12, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

I still haven't gone thru all the refs, but I thought I'd start checking on my own. First, AFAICT, VC "syllables" (Vn and V-geminate) are always accented on the V. But that could be a restriction on stressing (downstepping) on consonants, so I will disregard those as potentially irrelevant for demonstrating that Japanese has syllables. Second, AFAICT, all Sino-Japanese lexemes are accented, if at all, on the 1st mora. That is, ROku, never roKU. [Except for numerals and a few similar words which were still CVCV when a accent-shift to the 2nd mora took place] So the fact that these are never accented on the 2nd mora of a "diphthong" is again irrelevant. That's a big chunk of Japanese vocab. (A similar complicating factor may be at play in English etc. loans, I don't know.) Third, there are relatively few vowel sequences in native Japanese words, and since these all arose either thru mimesis or consonant elision, a large number are bimorphemic, and many which seem to be monomorphemic today were historically bimorphemic, so some counter-examples could be dismissed on that argument. Fourth, the putative sequence */ou/ is in nearly all cases /o:/; citations of */ou/ are in most cases perhaps an artifact of the writing system.

That said, there are some patterns which support the thesis. I checked vowel-initial words in Sanseidoh's Sinmeikai Kokugo Jiten, 4th ed. (1989). Looking at native words w sequences not divided by morpheme boundaries, as stipulated by K., /i:/ and /a:/ are each accented on first mora in 2 lexemes (/a:/ is mimetic), /e:/ in 1 (mimetic), and accented /u:/ is not found. /o:/ is the interesting one here: there are multiple examples of /o:/ accented on the second morpheme, often alternating with the first, but in oo'doka as the only possibility listed. I suppose you could argue that these are all disyllabic, but then we get into circular reasoning about justifying syllables. (There's a similar case spelled /ou/, which in this case I believe truly is /ou/.) If we expand to SJ and English loans, there are many more examples, all accented on the first.

Looking at /ue, uo, ui, ie, io, ae, ao, oa/ (many in loans, but a reasonable number native), there is no huge pattern. A tendency to 1st mora, but many examples on the second. /ei, oi/ are harder to tell, given an uncertainty on which forms are monomorphemic. (/ei/ is heavily dominated by SJ loans.)

That brings us to /ai, au/, which are universally accented on the first mora. /ai/ is dominated by SJ and to a lesser extent English. All native words starting w /ai/ are compounds of a single element, which is stressed on the first mora. For /au/, there is a single token, which is an English loan (/auto/, from "out"), as there is no SJ /au/.

So is the apparent nonsyllabicity of /ao/ and /ae/ and syllabicity of /ai/ and /au/ a reflection of native vs. loans? Native compounds may be the more convincing route to go. I'm not clear on how we can tell a priori whether VV is mono- or di-syllabic in Japanese. — kwami (talk) 06:46, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

My god, I just realized all refs are to the same guy! His examples are quite poor: they don't take the most elementary complicating factors into account. For example, /ae, ao/ are relatively common in native Japanese, and may be accented on either mora, while /ai, au/ are almost exclusively from Chinese (/ai/ and /o:/ from historic /au/) or English, and are accented on the first mora. Long /o:/ (apart from those written "ou" from Chinese) is largely native, and may be accented on either mora; /a:, e:, i:/ are largely loans, and accented on the first mora. Don't we have any peer review of this stuff? — kwami (talk) 07:09, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

Martin (2006) says that an accent on the second mora makes it a separate syllable. Does that mean that ha'e is one syllable, as K. transcribes it above, but that hae' is two? But M. (A Reference Grammar of Japanese) is not a rigorous book.

Iwasaki (2002) Japanese says s.t. about "the" three diphthongs, ai, oi, ui, but I can't get access. Tsujimura (1996) quotes Vance (1987) as saying that 'any possible vowel sequence may be a diphthong'. If that's true, does 'diphthong' have any real meaning in Japanese?

Sato (2006) Interaction between Phonetic Features and Accent-Placement in Japanese Family Names says, "Two-mora native Japanese words that form a descending diphthong usually have initial accent, with the accent being placed on the dominant mora, such as "koi" [...] and "kai". (I read this as meaning they usually are accented, and if so the accent is on the first mora.) No-one claims Japanese has rising diphthongs. But there are plenty of two-mora words such as hae which are accented on the 2nd mora. Also, verbs like taosu are accented on the 2nd, and K. maintains that verbs if accented are accented on the antepenultimate syllable. So it would seem that /ai/ and /oi/ are syllables, but that /ae/ and /ao/ are not, despite Tsujimura reporting that they are, or at least can be.

In Kyoto, the second mora of a "syllable" can be accented, in words like koi and tombi.[2] If Kyoto has syllables the same way that Tokyo has, and Yoshida & Zamma use the same terms for both, then it does not follow that two vowels in the same "syllable" form a diphthong. — kwami (talk) 07:21, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

Much of the confusion about monophthongs vs. diphthongs in Japanese stems from the idea that older forms of Japanese didn't have diphthongs, and the writing system reflects this. Also there is the inherited concept of 'mora' often being taken to mean that because a sound is treated moraically it is treated syllabically. However, it has never really been made clear what it means to treat something 'moraically' where as a syllable is phonetically realistic and a fairly workable language universal in concrete sense.

BTW, I'm sympathetic to the idea that traditional wisdom in Japanese phonology may be more reflective of the writing system than of the language itself. I've seen some weird phonological claims about Chinese based on the traditional onset-rhyme dictionary format. (On the other hand, similar criticisms have been made of a phonemic analysis being an artifact of using an alphabet.) Syllables aren't universal, and although Japanese may have 'normal' syllables, I have yet to see a coherent explanation as to what constitutes a diphthong in Japanese, or when a "long" vowel is monosyllabic and when it's disyllabic, whereas for English there is plenty of reference to justify A being a diphthong and B not being one, even if some of them are a bit fuzzy. — kwami (talk) 10:02, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

Some people define diphthongs as a unique co-articulation of two vowels. Others argue it is a vowel-glide-different vowel. Some argue for both. Still yet others have argued that, for example, the vowels of American English are typically 'diphthongs' because they finish with some sort of glide away from the vowel. I have yet to see a coherent argument here as to what a diphthong is for the purpose of this argument. Talk about circular. All vowels are monopthongs in Japanese, therefore Japanese has no diphthongs (apparently based on everyone citing Shibatani and Vance or simply plagiarizing a Japanese language learning site somewhere that says this). The argument that a monopthong is impossible because you can show acoustically that no vowel is a constant state. And you can show in articulation there is movement throughout. Please by all means Kwami show me a language that doesn't have syllables. What is and what is not a syllable is the issue. In spoken Japanese, long oo could be phonetically represented as something more like ou. No one here has made it clear as to why sequences like 'au' as in 'kau' shouldn't be considered a diphthong in a one-syllable word in Japanese. It is circular to say it isn't a diphthong because Japanese doesn't have diphthongs. And that is the argument being made here. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 10:55, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

or simply plagiarizing a Japanese language learning site somewhere that says this If you are claiming that part of this article is plagiarized, please specify the source. I'll delete it. Or somebody else will. Indeed, you can. If on the other hand nothing appears to be plagiarized, please don't suggest that something is. -- Hoary (talk) 09:56, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

And I'm sure you are going to counter with the languages that contain consonant sequences without medial vowels, but all that does is problematize the concept of syllable. All these languages have vowels, and all of them use vowels medially in some words. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 11:06, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

>> Such as? Apart from the diphthongs you are trying to establish, which would be a circular argument?

   "like their Spanish counterparts" is intended for readers who may not know what a "monophthong" is.<<

Isn't that kind of dumb even for wikilinguistics? What if they don't know Italian or Spanish. And you never did address the issue that this article is employing a phonetic notion of diphthong while at the same time dismissing any notion of diphthong in Japanese as phonetic. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 11:10, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

>>You say minimal pairs. Do you have examples of minimal pairs of /ai/ vs /a.i/? — kwami (talk)<<

Using that narrow of criteria, show the phonemic status of a diphthong in English. In 1987 Vance's work on Japanese phonology claimed that in 'actual speech' some vowel sequences are achieved as diphthongs. That was however in a discussion of phonology, not phonetics. I would bet most here don't have a clear distinction between the two anyway. However, if so many vowel sequences treated moraically are achieved in actual speech syllabically, we must abandon the idea that two mora equals two syllables, which could lead us to abandon the idea that two mora means no diphthongs. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 11:29, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

Secondly, Kubozono knows his stuff.

Thirdly:

"like their Spanish counterparts" is intended for readers who may not know what a "monophthong" is.

Isn't that kind of dumb even for wikilinguistics? What if they don't know Italian or Spanish.

If you want to say that linguistics in WP isn't much good, I'd agree. Is this dumb by the standards of WP? No, I don't think so. Of course many readers will be unfamiliar with these languages. But many readers will be familiar with them. So you explain something (perhaps only halfway) in one way, and you also explain it (perhaps better) in another way; what's wrong with that? -- Hoary (talk) 11:42, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

Let's take a word like 'au'--to meet. You say the two vowels are a sequence of monophthong [a] and [u]. Well, no one says a.u. They say 'au', quite like the Enlish 'ow'. If you said a.u everyone would look at you like you were crazy. There is no two-syllable word a.u. Moreover, no one has really made a coherent argument as to what a mora is here. If there are two mora, what the heck are they? Two isochronous units of time? What the heck does that mean? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 11:47, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

I haven't got a clue as to who Kubozono is or if he knows his stuff, but I was challenged here to find a citable source to support the idea of diphthongs in Japanese (the usual suspects doubted it). I think one issue is that monophthong was originally meant to be an ideal type in order to explain a contrast with a much different sort of vowel--such as a 'natural' diphthong with a lot of mouth movement. But it got into the abstract realm of phonemic theorizing and turned into yet another stupid monster in the room of linguistics. A PHONEME! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 11:50, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

What's stupid about phonemic analysis? -- Hoary (talk) 13:05, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

>>But many readers will be familiar with them. So you explain something (perhaps only halfway) in one way, and you also explain it (perhaps better) in another way; what's wrong with that?<<

What if I explained the sounds in Italian or Spanish by saying they are like the ones in Japanese? Would that prove useful too? I think statements like this ought to be avoided because they would require more clarification than the information they provide just to make them appear useful. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 12:03, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

Less so, I think, but merely because a smaller percentage of readers of English are familiar with Japanese than are familiar with Spanish or Italian. -- Hoary (talk) 13:05, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

>>So is the apparent nonsyllabicity of /ao/ and /ae/ and syllabicity of /ai/ and /au/ a reflection of native vs. loans? <<

No, it isn't because (1) Sino roots have so nativized they are called Sino-Japanese for a reason and (2), for example, the sequences [ai] and [au] are quite common in native Japanese. Take the verb 'au' , to meet. One of its stem forms is 'ai', it's dictionary form is 'au'. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 12:07, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

As stupid as this criteria is, I can show 'phonetic' diphthongs creating what Kwami would call a phonemic contrasts: 'nai' (there is not), 'nae' (seedling). To say na-i or na-e is to say nonsense non-words. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 12:23, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

The same verb au has forms with other vowel sequences besides ai: aeru, aou. Are you claiming that the vowel sequences become diphthongs in some cases but not in others? Is there a rule for that?

Your statement that "To say na-i or na-e is to say nonsense non-words" is exaggerated at best, but most certainly it's just wrong. That's exactly how natives speak, with monophthongs in hiatus. Any two vowels can meet in sequence in Japanese, probably in every possible pitch pattern, and there is no compelling evidence that they become diphthongs in some cases and not in others. Of course the mouth changes shape even during a monophthong, of course there is a continuous transition even in a hiatus, but none of these means there are diphthongs in Japanese. — AdiJapan 13:05, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

Kubozono explicitly excluded words like au "to meet" as bimorphemic. There are very few cases of native monomorphemes with au or ai. If you take K's argument that a diphthong can only be accented on its nucleus, then ae and ao cannot be diphongs in Tokyo, and in Kyoto neither can the others.

Yes, SJ is integrated into Japanese phonology. However, the phonotactics of SJ differs from that of native vocabulary, for example in being predominantly bi-moraic and accented on the first mora if at all. (Gaijin loans differ yet again.) Therefore I don't think it's unreasonable to ask whether a phonotactic pattern is related to SJ vocab. English has special phonotactics for Greco-Latin vocab. We wouldn't generalize that to all of English.

oo, though written <ou>, is not pronounced [ou]. It's simply [o:]. That's pretty elementary.

Au "to meet" clearly is pronounced as two vowels in hiatus in careful pronunciation. Don't you know the basics of the language?

Of course, in practice, every vowel shifts in articulation. The question is of the ideal vowel, as perceived by a native speaker: do they have a single target? In Japanese, they do. In English, many of them (/e:, o:, i:, u:/) do not. If you're going to use that argument for diphthongs, you might as well argue that /p, t, k/ are the same consonant, because they're all pronounced the same, and that it's only the surrounding vowels which differ.

I'm not objecting to the concept of Japanese having diphthongs. But if we're going to add that to the text, we shouldn't say "Japanese has diphthongs, but nobody knows which they are". So far I haven't seen anything that would enable us to say which they are, or at least no consensus in the lit as to which they are. Come on, if we're all too doofusy to know what to do, you'll have to explain it to us in little words. — kwami (talk) 19:45, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

>>What's stupid about phonemic analysis? -- Hoary (talk) 13:05, 11 June 2010 (UTC)<<

It's circular to say this or that phonemic contrasts create lexical contrasts (carry 'functional load') and then use lexical contrasts to show what phonemes are. It's obvious, for a start, that minimal pairs are fairly rare in the lexicon of a language. Moreover, we can show counterexamples--words that are pronounced the same but have entirely different meanings. Also, no one has ever demonstrated in speech processing or articulation research that phonemes exists. If anything, however you interpret the various results of these sorts of research, the one thing you can say is that no one has clearly demonstrated a phoneme. Also, most people can't even get close to agreeing what a phoneme is. It's a speech sound, it's a phone, no it's a sound category, it's a sound category existing outside human cognition (a Platonic cave projection), it's a sound category existing inside human cognition. Other attempts to use things like complementary distribution fail on contradictions, counter-examples and gaps in dealing with real phonology and phonetics. The phoneme is a nice little fiction to discuss a language in print in a somewhat more consistent manner than native writing systems allow. That is about all I can say for it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 02:35, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

But you're assuming a "real phonology". So far as phonology is real, what should its units be? Has anyone posited a unit that has been, or that promises to be, more useful than the phoneme? You have a point about the uncertainty of the nature of a phoneme, but I think you overdo it, and anyway the uncertainty is not unusual to phonemes -- the last I heard, linguists didn't even agree on what a syllable is. -- Hoary (talk) 09:56, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

>>Kubozono explicitly excluded words like au "to meet" as bimorphemic.<<

Show me where because 'au' to meet is not bimorphemic and it is not Sino-Japanese. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 02:37, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

>>If you take K's argument that a diphthong can only be accented on its nucleus, then ae and ao cannot be diphongs in Tokyo, and in Kyoto neither can the others.<<

What syllable with a nuclear vowel ISN'T accented on its nucleus? The question is whether or not the two vowels separate enough in order to justify saying there are one or two syllables in the sequence, a discussion further complicated by the concept of 'mora' which modern linguistics has adapted as a timing or rhythm unit, so giving it other content seems questionable. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 02:55, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

>>Au "to meet" clearly is pronounced as two vowels in hiatus in careful pronunciation. Don't you know the basics of the language?<<

There is no hiatus. In spoken Japanese 'au' is almost a perfect rhyme with English <ow> as in how, now, cow. You are one nucleus short of being a full diphthong. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 02:58, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

>>Of course, in practice, every vowel shifts in articulation. The question is of the ideal vowel, as perceived by a native speaker: do they have a single target? In Japanese, they do. In English, many of them (/e:, o:, i:, u:/) do not. If you're going to use that argument for diphthongs, you might as well argue that /p, t, k/ are the same consonant, because they're all pronounced the same, and that it's only the surrounding vowels which differ.<<

The point was Daniel Jones, I believe it was, originated the concept of 'monophthong' as an ideal type in phonetic description. He never meant it to be some sort of absolute category. Anyone who has studied the acoustics and articulations of vowels can tell you there is nothing that is a constant state about them. Formants emerge as something of a constant in acoustic analysis but these are not the same from beginning to end either. In terms of articulation about the only thing you can say is some vowels are more dynamic and involve more movement to create the tongue-mouth contours than others. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 03:05, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

>>In Japanese, they do. In English, many of them (/e:, o:, i:, u:/) do not. If you're going to use that argument for diphthongs, you might as well argue that /p, t, k/ are the same consonant, because they're all pronounced the same, and that it's only the surrounding vowels which differ.<<

The arguments about [p], [t] and [k] make no sense whatsoever. With consonants you typically have points and manners of articulation to refer to that help you to pin down what the overall articulatory target/gesture might be. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 03:09, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

I'm a native ja speaker and if asked to pronounce "au" (meet) slowly or clearly for non-native ja speakers, I would say the verb "a (pause) u". Oda Mari (talk) 06:31, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

"There is no hiatus. In spoken Japanese 'au' is almost a perfect rhyme with English <ow> as in how, now, cow." --- That, I'm guessing, is your own opinion, probably formed by your own listening of natives. Then of course you wouldn't mind if I did the same sort of original research. Which I did. I asked a native (speaker of the Tokyo dialect) to pronounce two sentences in the most natural way. (He didn't know what I was looking for, usually I ask him this sort of questions when I'm learning the pitch accent of new words.) Here are the two sample sentences:

1. 東京で会う。 Toukyou de au.
2. 何時に会う？ Nan ji ni au?

In the first sentence you could argue that phonetically [u] is weaker than [a], because of the downstep as well as the nature of the two vowels, so a case could be made for a diphthong. But in the second sentence it was without any doubt a clear hiatus; there is no way you could say it was a diphthong. Is it possible that a diphthong becomes a hiatus just with a change in intonation? I doubt it is. My conclusion is that /au/ is a hiatus.

I may not know much about phonetics, but I have a few advantages: in my native language (Romanian) we have both [a.u] and [aw], totally distinct; I've been speaking Japanese for some ten years and I've been surrounded by natives all this time; and finally I'm much less influenced by English than you seem to be.

This, of course, is not an argument in itself (it's "original research" as I said), but might get you thinking that what you hear is not necessarily what others hear, nor what natives perceive. — AdiJapan 08:21, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

BTW, I assume that K. would not count au "to meet" as a diphthong because it's bimorphemic. The question is whether a monomorphemic word like kai or koi has a diphthong, at least in Tokyo. Perhaps if our friend supplied us with a reference that actually listed the diphthongs of Japanese, we'd have more to go on. — kwami (talk) 08:24, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

A list of possible diphthongs in Japanese. This one looks pretty good: http://www.fonetiks.org/sou3ja.html

Even a conservative account of Japanese like Kindaichi allows for two diphthongs in spoken standard (Tokyo dialect) Japanese. http://books.google.com/books?id=tMNXDsBv2fgC&pg=PA103&lpg=PA103&dq=how+many+vowels+in+Japanese&source=bl&ots=9ggLO1dFzT&sig=DehliVC5B7Mng_dyajYaVHuiChM&hl=en&ei=0awUTKadOYnGcPr77foL&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=9&ved=0CDYQ6AEwCDhQ#v=onepage&q=diphthong&f=false —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 10:06, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

The 1st ref you gave is just a bunch of vowel sequences. You didn't even bother to check if they might cross compound boundaries, and many of them do. There's nothing on that site to suggest any of them are diphthongs.

The 2nd ref you gave said that the diphthongs are ya, yu, yo, and wa on one page, and discussed the likelihood of half of the alleged 8 vowels of Old Japanese being diphthongs on the other, not a new idea and irrelevant to the present discussion. Nowhere does it mention diphthongs like ai, au, oi in Modern Japanese.

Come on, a simple description of which diphthongs are found in Japanese, preferably including how it was determined they are diphthongs. If you can't provide that, there's not a lot we can do with diphthongs in the article. — kwami (talk) 10:23, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

More evidence that any phonological treatment of spoken Japanese needs to consider the possibility of diphthongs:

http://ado.lib.kagoshima-u.ac.jp/handle/10232/855

First language prosodic timing is a priority issue for TESOL teachers and phonologists alike (Celce-Murcia et al 1996; Cutler et al 1994). Vowel sequences are important because they reveal several crucial aspects of this timing in a microcosm. However, cross-linguistic comparisons need to be reassessed according to whether the focus is on micro-phonetic phenomena such as the transition between two adjacent vowels, or broader phonological indices such as vowel length or accent. Conclusions hinge on a few central observations. Phonologists tend to think of phonetic nucleus as being characterized by phonological accent. However, the comparisons of Japanese and English vowel sequences found in the literature and tested by experimental studies (Gore 2003) show that phonetic nucleus and phonological accent do not necessarily go hand in hand. It seems possible for a phonological diphthong to influence accent placement in Japanese, while being phonetically indistinguishable from a sequence which has no effect on accent; and it also seems possible for a sequence not normally considered a phonological diphthong to show more diphthongal phonetic characteristics than one which does constitute a phonological diphthong.

http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=JASMAN0000800000S1000S96000004&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes

Are the effects of changes in speech rate on F2 transition slopes in languages with and without unitary diphthongs explicable in terms of general phonetic and physiological principles? Five American English diphthongs and four Japanese vowel sequences were recorded, spoken at three different tempos by eight and seven speakers, respectively. LPC spectra were computed at 10-ms intervals, and the resulting F2 contours were analyzed by a computer program designed to objectively define and measure steady-state and transitional portions of the vowel. Contrary to the claims of Gay [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 44, 1570–1573 (1968)], speech rate was found to significantly affect two measures of transition slope in English, with slope decreasing as speech rate increased. Individual diphthong populations in both languages displayed high correlations between a transition, slope and its F2 range, indicating that rate adjustment is not simply a matter of target undershoot at faster speeds. Japanese showed less rate-dependent variability, suggesting that temporal reorganization for different speech rates is affected by language-specific structures. [Work supported by NIH.]

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=rTR-yKOhtfEC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=diphthongs+japanese&ots=OG0d_U6CnF&sig=yVdzNmNttjJFlPbLQw8xob81lAg#v=onepage&q=diphthongs%20japanese&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=rTR-yKOhtfEC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=diphthongs+japanese&ots=OG0d_U6CnF&sig=yVdzNmNttjJFlPbLQw8xob81lAg#v=onepage&q=diphthongs%20japanese&f=false

http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=12403493

http://www.lit.kobe-u.ac.jp/linguistics/KPL/4_2004/KPL_2004_katrin.pdf

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=QXEgn1PCQsAC&oi=fnd&pg=PA147&dq=diphthongs+japanese&ots=7mED5FOPu9&sig=kkvLRMjTdEKpUrzzFT5cEdz9AxU#v=onepage&q=diphthong&f=false —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 10:56, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

>> Nowhere does it mention diphthongs like ai, au, oi in Modern Japanese.<<

Which is why I described it as a CONSERVATIVE account!

This page here, http://www.fonetiks.org/sou3ja.html , specifically refers to them all as diphthongs. I am not arguing that here, but you had better come up with some sort of criteria as to what is and what is not to be considered a diphthong. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 11:05, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

The article also states:

>>In most phonological analyses, all vowels are treated as occurring with the time frame of one mora. Phonetically long vowels, then, are treated as a sequence of two identical vowels. For example, ojiisan is /oziisaɴ/ not /oziːsaɴ/.<<

With hiatus or without? One use of the concept of 'mora' simply states that a long vowel is two mora and a short vowel one. The problem is no one can agree as to what a mora is in the real evidence of speech. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 11:22, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

Yes, the mora is problematic, but you're getting into WP:OR at this point.

A diphthong is a vowel. A sequence is not. So the question of whether ae is a diphthong depends on whether it's one vowel or two. There may not be an easy answer to that question, but what I would expect would be s.t. like the reasoning behind finding that /tʃ/ is an affricate in English, but /ts/ is not. That at least is one approach to the question, which bypasses the problem of what a syllable is. But there's also a diphthong as a vocalic nucleus+coda. Either way, it's going to be a phonological decision, not just a phonetic one.

BTW, there's a lot of imprecise use of the word 'diphthong' in Japanese. For example, in one source I just saw, nyu contains a diphthong, but yu does not. And there is clearly a diff tween what various refs accept as a diphthong even of the /ae, ai/ kind. So no, I don't need to define what a diphthong is in Japanese, your sources do. That's the whole point of presenting evidence in an argument: whoever presents the argument needs to provide the evidence. So far you've demonstrated that there is a lot of talk about "diphthongs" in Japanese. But there are plenty of sources which state that Japanese, like Russian and Hungarian, has no diphthongs. If we're to cover this adequately, we're going to need to know (a) what the diphthongs are, (b) why there is disagreement over there existence, and (c) how well accepted they are in the field. — kwami (talk) 11:32, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

>>Either way, it's going to be a phonological decision, not just a phonetic one. <<

That itself is not clear. There has been an awful lot of phonetic deciding done here in these discussions.

>>So far you've demonstrated that there is a lot of talk about "diphthongs" in Japanese.<<

This article cites very few sources of a scholarly nature on Japanese. I just cited a whole slew where diphthongs are discussed. A cited an old classic, Kindaichi, which at least admits of two diphthongs. You are the embodiment of a bad faith discussant Kwami. You say you are going to need to know what the diphthongs are. Take an analogy. What are the phonemes of English--counts vary by almost a dozen. Back to Japanese, a conservative account would admit of a handful, a more flexible approach would expand the number considerably and enunciate a principle as to why this or that particular sequence should not be treated as a diphthong. So far no one here has done that--you only dismiss the idea of diphthongs in a circular argument that has lacked evidence totally. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 11:49, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

Well let's not worry about the frightful Kwami. Go ahead, Mr/Ms IP, tell us what you want to say. -- Hoary (talk) 12:57, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

I just did in how many words Hoary? But you can't have a discussion with people who alter the record to suit themselves. At any rate, any description of Japanese vowels that doesn't include the possibility of diphthongs does not reflect how many years of discussion in actual scholarly treatment of Japanese phonology and phonetics. I don't care what Kwami says, he has been so demonstratively wrong on most points so far.

At one extreme, just about any vowel sequence could be treated as a potential diphthong in Japanese. Then we might use auditory perception to determine whether or not hiatus rules them out. Even if we can't provide phonemic accounts of said dipthongs, that does not rule out inclusion in any discussion of the phonology of Japanese--you might start with some of the sources this article has in its bibliography but fails to consult or specifically cite. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 13:07, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

No, no: you go ahead. You can either edit the article directly, or you can write a draft in your own user area (at least after you've taken the trouble to get your own username). -- Hoary (talk) 13:11, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

I have a user name. I just don't use it until an area has been cleared of bridge trolls. Some articles you can never get them out no matter what (e.g. 'phonology', 'phoneme', etc.). Anyone can edit, but how do you stop the re-edits and reversions to suit the bridge trolls? It's a wiki-dilemma.

Here is kwami being 'civil' in his own way, to a published scholar (can you feel the envy?): >>Wait, V1 must be more sonorous than V2? Nonsense. The author apparently doesn't know the difference between rising and falling diphthongs. I wonder if that's because there are no diphthongs in his language? — kwami (talk) 01:03, 11 June 2010 (UTC)<< —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk)

Before I was so rudely interrupted yesterday, I was digging into sources on Japanese phonology and phonetics, particularly diphthongs. But wait, first the so-called syllabic N. If this is realized as a nasalized vowel (or a nasalization and lengthening of the preceding vowel), what does that do to statements like 'all Japanese vowels are pure vowels or monopthongs'? Now about the diphthongs. It has to be remembered that phonological and phonetic accounts of languages exist for different reasons. In the case of Japanese, most typically they exist for these purposes: 1. Japanese description for native literacy and language awareness, 2. JSL and JFL learning (to make the language more understandable, accessible and learnable, it is hoped), 3. academic, somewhat technical descriptions for phonetics and phonology. This article seems to draw on all three trends in a somewhat mixed up fashion. Finally for now, even if we can not demonstrate a strict 'phonemic' status for any Japanese diphthongs, that does not mean they do not participate in phonological and morpho-phonological processes in Japanese. Therefore, I will undertake to writing up an account of what are the possible diphthongs of Japanese in some fairly standard sources and amend this article appropriately. Of course the explanation will include the qualifications and controversies (e.g. why some would claim Japanese has no diphthongs, while others would claim it has no phonemic dipthongs, while others would say it has at least three, while others would claim a long list of them). This will include the source Vance, which is a fairly conservative mostly phonemic account of Tokyo dialect Japanese. It is cited here in the bibliography, but apparently no one has bothered to consult it on diphthongs, among other things133.7.7.240 (talk) 08:11, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

Now that sounds reasonable.

As for nasal vowels, that's a different thing than a diphthong. You can have "pure" nasal vowels as well as nasal diphthongs. As for the case in Japanese, it's allophony. We have allophonic nasal vowels in English too, but we don't therefore say that "English has nasal vowels". — kwami (talk) 09:20, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

The question though is: are these nasalized, vowelized forms of syllabic /N/ monophthongs? Also, it's an interesting sort of allophony because it strains 'phonetic relatedness', crossing categories from a consonant into a vowel. A different way of dealing with the issue, though, is to say the syllabic /N/ results in a lengthening and nasalization of the preceding vowel. But this also might depend on how you analyze syllables in Japanese, with many accounts being syllable-avoiding (or at least they wouldn't like the idea that the syllabic /N/ is actually a syllable coda, even if it adds to mora counts).133.7.7.240 (talk) 02:41, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

The article needs a re-think here, but before I get into a tug-of-war over who has the right to make statements about Japanese's vowels, let me look at this issue here:

    The article states:
    >>Vowels have a phonemic length  distinction (short vs. long). Compare contrasting   
      pairs of words like ojisan  /ozisaɴ/ "uncle" vs. ojiisan /oziisaɴ/ "grandfather", or 
      tsuki /tuki/ "moon" vs. tsūki /tuuki/ "airflow". In most phonological analyses,    
      all vowels are treated as occurring with the time frame of one mora. Phonetically 
      long vowels, then, are treated as a sequence of two identical vowels. For example, 
      ojiisan is /oziisaɴ/ not /oziːsaɴ/.<<

So is the article claiming that 'vowel length' is its own phoneme? Some accounts simply say a short vowel, relatively speaking, is 'one beat', and a long vowel, 'two beats'. In other words, in terms of linguistic timing (and it is hoped somewhat isochronous in actual research), that means a short vowel is in a one-mora syllable while a long vowel is in a two-mora syllable. WHY EXCLUDE SUCH EXPLANATIONS? Moreover, it should be pointed out that this quoted bit above then says "Phonetically the long vowels, then, are treated as a sequence of two identical vowels", but what are they phonologically and phonemically (since so much has been made of the need to exclude diphthongs on theoretical phonemic basis)? 133.7.7.240 (talk) 12:20, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

I'm going from memory and a paper for EFL that I wrote in 1988 that cites Vance, 1987. I of course plan to go to the original source as soon as I can find it for re-writing the section on vowels. However, I thought I would broach the topic here first to see if it might be possible to get some agreement ahead of time. So to sum up Vance on vowel inventories in Japanese, he basically says there are 5 vowel qualities but since vowel length is 'contrastive' (in a classical phonemic sense, and moreover, some linguists claim vowel length carries a lot of 'load' in spoken Japanese), Vance expands the vowel phoneme inventory to 5 short vowels and 5 long vowels.

So the question is: why couldn't this alternative account, once properly sourced, be included in this discussion? 133.7.7.240 (talk) 11:05, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

Citation style

The entire article is suspect and most likely represents the views of very few people. The bibliography is of some length, but it's not really clear how this material has been used to compose most of the article. For example, the previous waste-of-time discussion diphthongs, when the article itself cites a work that discusses diphthongs in Japanese while the article denies their existence. More wiki-garbage in linguistics. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 11:58, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

So go ahead and improve it. -- Hoary (talk) 12:36, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

I can't even post to the freaking edit/discussion page without being deleted, such as the stunt Kwami pulled here. Who has the time to spend hours and even days fighting every deletion and reversion of the bridge trolls of wiki? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 13:09, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

A stunt? Please identify the offending "diff". (You can find it here.) And sign your posts: you do this by hitting the twiddle key "~" four times in a row. (Even a humorless ignoramus dogmatic doofus -- did I forget anything? -- such as myself can manage to do this.) -- Hoary (talk) 13:16, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

Please, Hoary, no feeding the trolls. You're our link to sanity here. — kwami (talk) 13:17, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

No, I won't sign my posts. They auto-sign, something even a moronic wiki like this can do. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 13:20, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

Did you guys want to discuss why this article isn't in conformance with the usual citation style or did you just want to continue to act like egomaniacal doofuses? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 13:21, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the choice; I'll plump for the latter. Meanwhile, if you would like to improve the citation style, go ahead. -- Hoary (talk) 13:38, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

>>A stunt? Please identify the offending "diff"<<

From memory I can see that Kwami deleted part of the discussion about the Tokyo informant for the Romanian who knows for sure what a Japanese diphthong is because he/she has less exposure to English than I do. But you two seem to have a lot of time on your hands so you go figure it out. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 13:23, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

Nope. If you want to complain, you decide whether or not you can be bothered to do the spadework. If you can, it's likely that the complaint will be investigated. If you can't, it won't be. -- Hoary (talk) 13:38, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

>>Nope. If you want to complain, you decide whether or not you can be bothered to do the spadework. If you can, it's likely that the complaint will be investigated. If you can't, it won't be. -- Hoary (talk) 13:38, 13 June 2010 (UTC)<<

Certain people think they are above the rules and working policies of wiki, such as what went on here yesterday, which included the deletion of others' content in order to alter the outcome of an argument. However, getting back to the purpose of this particular discussion, it really is a major fault of the article that so many good sources have been tacked on to a bibliography, but that these sources have not been integrated into the actual discussion of the article on Japanese phonology. That was my point in starting this section, the vandalistic actions of certain self-appointed wiki experts notwithstanding. Answer the charge or allow others to improve this woeful article.133.7.7.240 (talk) 08:19, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

We're still waiting for you to provide sources for improvements. You have yet to provide us with so much as an account of which diphthongs Japanese has. — kwami (talk) 09:16, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

I'm less worried about the bibliography than you are, but I can see that some people may get the wrong impression that the article has been improved by reference to, or even that it reflects the insights offered in, those works. I've therefore commented out every item that isn't cited. (As the markup isn't conspicuous and might otherwise go unnoticed, I've added strings of "+" characters to draw attention to it.) ¶ I allow you to improve this woeful article, if you do so by citing respected phonology texts. (But I don't have to allow you -- the article is not "protected" or even "semi-protected".) -- Hoary (talk) 11:06, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

 >>We're still waiting for you to provide sources for improvements. You have yet to   
   provide us with so much as an account of which diphthongs Japanese has. — kwami (talk) 
   09:16, 14 June 2010 (UTC)<<

First, I provided you a page that lists all possible diphthongs of Japanese (or at least all possible vowel combinations) and it even includes sound files so you can listen as to whether or not they might meet some criteria for determining what is and what is not a diphthong (better than a report of someone in Tokyo being asked to read a sentence aloud if only because we can all hear it). I have also provided you with the citation of Kindaichi, an older, traditional 'phonemic' approach to the phonology of Japanese, which compasses two or three diphthongs (I can't remember right now). Moreover, as I have pointed out, the other diphthongs in a phonological discussion are listed in Vance, which this article had in its bibliography but didn't obviously make use of. I plan to use Kindaichi, Vance and at least one more, but having moved offices recently, those books are apparently in storage somewhere.133.7.7.240 (talk) 02:49, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

"all possible diphthongs of Japanese (or at least all possible vowel combinations)" -- these are not even close to being the same thing. Also, I challenge anyone to tell from sound files of English /dz/, /dʒ/, /ts/ and /tʃ/ (say, adze, cage, catsup, catch) which are the affricates.

Kindaichi proposes four diphthongs in Japanese, actually: /ja/, /ju/, /jo/, and /wa/. That seems a bit off-topic.

But I sympathize with the move. I can't locate half of my refs either. (And I don't have Vance.) — kwami (talk) 06:27, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

    >>"all possible diphthongs of Japanese (or at least all possible vowel combinations)" 
     -- these are not even close to being the same thing<<

Well it is a site with phonetics. To be generous to it, it takes the most expansive view of diphthong possible. Also, it's easier to hear vowel sounds like this in sound files than it is fricative, affricate and sibilant consonants. I do have to wonder how anyone anywhere could claim Japanese 'oi' isn't a diphthong once you hear it shouted. 133.7.7.240 (talk) 14:02, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

Interjections and mimesis are not good data for arguing the general phonology of a language. If we did that, we'd have to say that English is a click language that allows fricatives as nuclei. — kwami (talk) 21:23, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

Except 'oi' is like the equivalent of 'Hey there' in Japanese and warrants entries in dictionaries. So you can continue to dissent all you want, but I think readers will benefit that this article is finally going to get a bit of improvement. Am looking for Kindaichi, Vance and the CUP publication 'Languages of Japan' (I forget the author but he is a top academic linguist). 133.7.7.240 (talk) 03:21, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

Huh? "Hey" is also an interjection. Lots of interjections get into dictionaries, but that doesn't mean that that they follow normal phonology. "Tsk" and "tchik" made it into the OED, but that doesn't make English a click language.

The CUP book is Sibatani. Little help there: he never mentions diphthongs. He simply has 5 vowels, long and short. Long vowels are not single segments, as tone drop occurs in the middle of them, but neither are they equivalent to vowel sequences involving grammatical endings or compounds. So it would appear their are monosyllabic vowel sequences and disyllabic vowel sequences. That is, /a/ vs /a:/ vs /aa/, where /:/ is a segmental phoneme, or /a./ vs /aa./ vs /a.a/. [My OR here:] the oo in ookii and the ae in hae would therefore need to be disyllabic, since the tone can rise in the middle of them, and therefore hae cannot be a diphthong. ai would normally seem to be monosyllabic, but (extrapolating from Sibatani) a monosyllabic sequence, not a diphthong, not a segment.

Yes, I'm aware that diphthongs are often defined simply as two vowels in the same syllable, but Sibatani shows things are not that simple for a moraic language. There is another common definition of diphthongs: two vowels in the same segment (a vocalic contour segment). (After all, contours consonants (affricates) are defined segmentally, not syllabically.) That might be a better test for a moraic language like Japanese. — kwami (talk) 06:44, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

I'm still looking for my copy of Shibatani. He has 5 vowel sounds, but how many vowel phonemes in his inventory? In other research, it's been noted formant changes across the long vowels, so calling them a monophthong is doubtful (even if this goes back to an articulatory phonetic distinction between 'pure' and 'complex' vowels). Both the terms 'diphthong' and 'segment' are problematic. For example, we don't speak speech in segments; linguists analyze speech into segments. Still, I'm not sure what use I can make of Shibatani or how it squares with the explanation in this article. Much of the problem is there seems to be very little explicit agreement as to how to use terms like sound sequence, segment, syllable, diphthong, etc. I'm not even sure what it means to say a language is 'moraic' since you can apply a term like 'mora' to any number of languages, including English (if you can discern an isochronous unit of timing, or at least a linguistically relative unit of timing). Clearly this article explanation of the vowels could benefit from taking in a few more accounts and explaining the differences. There are so many controversies in linguistics its misleading and not useful to be dogmatic about a given language133.7.7.240 (talk) 12:36, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

I agree with you there. Many of these terms are arguable; in fact, that what a lot of phonologists spend much of their time doing. Although we should include the controversies over Japanese in this article, it's too much to include arguments over whether 'phoneme' is a valid concept: leave that to the phoneme article.

Sibatani posits 5 vowel phonemes: /a e i o u/, and discusses that Kindaiti would have a 6th, /:/. He hedges his bets a bit, admitting that long vowels cause difficulties and are not easy to analyse. He said somewhere (now I can't find it) something about the difficulties of trying to get a perfect phonemic analysis, and doubting that it's worthwhile.

You're really hung up over monophthongs! Yes, of course, any vowel will have variation in its articulation. The question is whether such variation is meaningful. When you ask someone to pronounce a monophthong clearly, they attempt to make it as steady as possible. With a diphthong, it's always a contour. With a monophthong, the more carefully it's enunciated, the less contour it displays; with a diphthong, the more carefully it's enunciated, the more contour it displays, reaching a farther target. With a monophthong, the contour is variable in direction, depending on surrounding consonants (and especially adjacent vowels!); with a diphthong, the contour may be variable to a degree, but these are variations on a single direction: say, low-back to high-front, even if the start and end points, or the curve of the path between them, vary. — kwami (talk) 20:32, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

    >>since the tone can rise in the middle of them, and therefore hae  cannot be a   
      diphthong. ai would normally seem to be monosyllabic, <<

Could you clarify what you mean here? Just re-state the part about what 'tone' does and what this means as to what is and what is not possible. Thanks. 133.7.7.240 (talk) 12:54, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

I think Kwami is talking about Japanese pitch accent. Hae/fly, hai/lung aitai/want to meet and kai/buying are all LH accent and the stress is on the second vowel. Oda Mari (talk) 15:38, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

Right. One of the things I keep reading over and over in accounts that posit diphthongs is that we know they're diphthongs because the 'accent' (which in Tokyo dialect is a downstep) can only occur on the first element. But in hae etc. are accented on the 2nd element, so by that argument cannot be monosyllabic.

Oda Mari, my dictionary says hai 'lung' has no accent. If it has high pitch on the i, presumably that's the same rise in pitch that we get with ha 'leaf', which also has no accent (unlike ne 'root'). A diphthongist would say that it's a simple rise in pitch across the diphthong, just as across the vowel of ha. You can see it isn't 'accented' on that syllable in haiga 'lung(NOM)', where the high tone continues onto the subject particle ga. (Assuming you have the same stress patterns as my dictionary!)

As for aitai and kai 'buying', AFAICT all of our 'syllabic' sources would say these are not monosyllabic, because they are not monomorphemic. They all mention that you can get 'accent' on the 2nd element of a vowel sequence when it's a separate morpheme, such as the final u or i of a verb.

BTW, Sibatani, who our anon. protester recommends as an expert, uses this restriction in accent placement in words like kai 'shell' to argue that accent placement is determined by syllables rather than by moras in Tokyo Japanese. However, he does not conclude from that that Japanese has diphthongs: he posits 5 vowels plus length, and says that "The basic vowel phonemes [of Tokyo] are quite straightforward." — kwami (talk) 19:56, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

   >>Right. One of the things I keep reading over and over in accounts that posit   
   diphthongs is that we know they're diphthongs because the 'accent' (which in Tokyo 
   dialect is a downstep) can only occur on the first element. But in hae etc. are 
   accented on the 2nd element, so by that argument cannot be monosyllabic.<<

1. Some sources on 'syllable' and 'diphthong' (not just in Japanese) do not exclude differences in accent going either way. The only requirement is that there is a difference between the two vowel elements that form the diphthong.

2. I am not recommending Shibatani, I'm just trying to find my copy of his book. I had long suspected he was too abstract and antiquated in his handling of phonology and phonemics, and that these probably weren't his strong points anyway (probably a background in socio-linguistics and ethnography, given the expertise on Ainu).

3. I wouldn't make too much of my anonymity Kwami because no one here thinks that is your real name. Let's just say for now my IP address is my pen name and that tells more than your pen name since yours doesn't show an IP address even.

4. My points about vowels, diphthongs and syllables in Japanese comes down to this: this article presents a somewhat erratic but technical view of vowels, diphthongs, mora, etc. but is oblivious to the fact that there are various accounts of these concepts and these concepts as applied to Japanese. So what is not clear is how such an idiosyncratic view was derived from the given sources (but it looks like two plus the synthesis of Kwami and several others, citations lacking). What is erroneous about the presentation of vowels etc. here is the omission of other descriptions, accounts and explanations. 133.7.7.240 (talk) 02:10, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

    >>You're really hung up over monophthongs! Yes, of course, any vowel will have  
    variation in its articulation. The question is whether such variation is meaningful.<<

Right, I don't like the term 'monophthong' very much at all, because I doubt it exists in any spoken language (just as cardinal vowels don't). Because phonemics, however limited and paradox-prone, doesn't need such descriptions. As I pointed out before, I suspect it was a phonetician who came up with the idea, in order to contrast in articulatory terms somewhat simple vs. somewhat complex vowels (and on to dipthongs, triphthongs, from there). I'm not sure whether the question of such variation depends on 'meaningful'. You seem to ignore that criterion in your follow-up explanation anyway. At any rate, if Shibatani, one of the published experts on Japanese, says the vowel length does create difficulties for phonemic accounts, isn't that worth mentioning?133.7.7.240 (talk) 02:17, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

    >>Huh? "Hey" is also an interjection. Lots of interjections get into dictionaries, 
      but that doesn't mean that that they follow normal phonology. "Tsk" and "tchik" made 
      it into the OED, but that doesn't make English a click language.<<

But notice the BIG difference here. Tsk, psst, shhh, clicks, these might be possible in English but hardly typical sequences of sounds, and not ones important to creating the phonic substance of the lexicon. On the other hand, Japanese may have relatively few 'vowel types' or 'vocalic values', but as a spoken language it is filled with vowels sounds. And it also has many vowel possible patterns of vowel combinations, some of which might be diphthongs in a phonological sense. Even if one or two sources (unclearly cited) tell us not. 133.7.7.240 (talk) 02:21, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

    >>I agree with you there. Many of these terms are arguable; in fact, that what a lot 
    of phonologists spend much of their time doing. Although we should include the 
    controversies over Japanese in this article, it's too much to include arguments over 
    whether 'phoneme' is a valid concept: leave that to the phoneme article.<<

Not quite because some of the controversy comes from the difficulty in applying concepts that were got through analyzing, for example, English, to a relatively unrelated language (isolate), for example, Japanese (and Japan is a land of many academic linguists). Also, the way this article deploys such terms as syllable, monophthong, diphthong, tone, etc. you get the feeling there is a nuanced intelligence behind these decisions, but for an encyclopedia article, that can be obscurantist, not explanatory. There might even be a whiff of reverse Nihonjinron about. By the way, the phoneme article sucks big time. That is all they could do there, argue, and the ones with the last reverts and entries prevailed (much to the detriment of the article). 133.7.7.240 (talk) 02:28, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

    >>As for aitai and kai 'buying', AFAICT all of our 'syllabic' sources would say 
      these are not monosyllabic, because they are not monomorphemic. They all mention 
      that you can get 'accent' on the 2nd element of a vowel sequence when it's a 
      separate morpheme, such as the final u or i of a verb.<<

Well, in some languages, even morpheme boundaries are not clear (English for one). But I'm following the argument here both for monophthongs and two-vowel sequences (that could or could not be diphthongs, which themselves may or may not exist). For example, the monopthongs. At least in a simplistic phonetic sense for the sake of argument (what native speakers say in controlled speech, what we hear in the acoustic data, what me might perceive--so even this is not so simple), we could say about monophthongs that we might a a one-mora type, a two-mora sequence of the same vowel with not break in morpheme, and a two-mora sequence that crosses morpheme boundaries (such as from the end of content morpheme hiatus onto a grammatical morpheme, most notable 'o' or 'wo').

Now about the diphthong examples, let's assume 'kai' is two-morpheme because of the highly inflectional nature of Japanese verbs. But what about the word 'kai' as in shell? There are actually all sorts of 'kai' morphemes in Japanese, most of which are not bi-morphemically inflected. 133.7.7.240 (talk) 02:41, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

Also, it seems to me we are making morpho-phonological arguments against diphthongs in Japanese, and not clear-cut phonological or phonetic ones. 133.7.7.240 (talk) 02:43, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

    >>Right. One of the things I keep reading over and over in accounts that posit 
    diphthongs is that we know they're diphthongs because the 'accent' (which in Tokyo 
    dialect is a downstep) can only occur on the first element.<<

Over the past few days, I've seen pitch, tone and accent used as something different but also as something almost the same. Could you clarify what you mean by the terms? Traditional accounts say there is limited (and dialectal) use of contrasting pitch in spoken Japanese. Some say this is a type of contrastive tone. You seemed to have used 'tone' before in a different sense. Accent could mean a rise in pitch and/or an increase in stress. I've even seen acoustic accounts of 'long' vowels in Japanese that shows they are stressed (which is not to say that isochrony in Japanese makes the same use of stress as English does, although most linguists are going to weasel words like 'stress-based', 'syllable-based' and 'mora-based' to avoid the over-committment of terms like 'stress-timed', etc.). 133.7.7.240 (talk) 02:52, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

    >>With a monophthong, the more carefully it's enunciated, the less  contour it 
     displays; with a diphthong, the more carefully it's enunciated, the more contour it 
     displays, reaching a farther target. With a monophthong, the contour is variable in 
     direction, depending on surrounding consonants (and especially adjacent vowels!);   
     with a diphthong, the contour may be variable to a degree, but these are variations 
     on a single direction: say, low-back to high-front, even if the start and end   
     points, or the curve of the path between them, vary. —<<

Huh? What has any of this to do with 'meaningful' in the linguistic sense of the term? Sounds to me like you have an article on articulatory criteria for differentiating simple vowel gestures from diphthongal vowel gestures in the making though. I doubt if actual articulatory data will back up your theory, but you should give it a crack. 133.7.7.240 (talk) 02:58, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

Genesis of the article 2

The genesis is still unclear because the article cites many sources which it never apparently used. But more important than its genesis at this point is its appalling current state, which can be said about most linguistics pages at wiki. 133.7.7.240 (talk) 06:42, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

Yes. So improve it. Or give up on it. Or provide an incentive for others to work on it. Or (yawn) just continue to moan about it. -- Hoary (talk) 08:49, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

The anon's statement about unused sources is currently incorrect since unattributed sources are now part of the "further reading" section. Claims not backed up by sources can always carry a {{citation needed}} tag. It looks unsightly, but there are a number of benefits to that approach. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 09:01, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

Until I get my sources lined up, I have to give up on it. It is still yet another total wiki-waste. However, then the fun would start--all the arguments, all the reverts, all the wasted time trying to help a pathetic article. Are you sleepy hoary? As for the unused sources, there are plenty of claims in the article not backed up by any sources. 133.7.7.240 (talk) 09:54, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

I'm not only sleepy, I'm pathetic. ¶ Well then, run along, line up your sources, and then decide whether you want to (a) waste your time trying to help a pathetic article or (b) spend your time on some more rewarding activity. If your choice is (b), no need to announce this: others here will easily infer it from your continuing absence. -- Hoary (talk) 10:16, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

Or I should say, plenty of claims that for all we know come from one of the sources but with no actual reference to any source. 133.7.7.240 (talk) 10:03, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

Hoary, since you don't add anything of substance to this discussion, why don't you run along?133.7.7.240 (talk) 11:08, 26 June 2010 (UTC) |}

Inconsistency over the use of phoneme

Article inconsistency that is jarring: The consonants are described schematically as 'phonemes' but with traditional articulatory phonetic detail (point of articulation cross-referenced with manner of articulation). The vowels are not so described--they are simply called vowels. 133.7.7.240 (talk) 10:01, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

Online sources not (as far as can be discerned) used for this article

This dissertation online could be a considerable resource for any description of the phonology of Japanese. It's framework is 'natural phonology' but such a framework generates alternative and yet coherent discussions of the vowels, vowel lengthening and diphthongs.

http://www.trussel.com/jap/edsmith.htm#1.1

some examples: 2.3.1 Vowel length

As is typical of mora-counting languages, vowel length in Japanese is distinctive, and all five vowels occur in both long and short varieties. Long vowels will be written as a vowel plus homorganic glide sequence (VV̯), the vowel representing the syllable peak and the homorganic glide the offset e.g....Although for convenience long vowels are here written as two segments there is evidence, both diachronic and synchronic, that they are in fact unitary. Historically long vowels have not undergone diphthongization as might be expected if they were structurally bipartite (cf. Donegan 1978, p. 56). What changes they have undergone e.g. raising [ææ̯] > [ee̯] have affected the long vowel as a whole. There is also evidence from synchronic speech processing.

2.3.2 Diphthongs

A diphthong is a syllable nucleus with two vowel segments only one of which is syllabic. The non-syllabic may come from an adjoining consonant which is weakened e.g. z > y, b > w; or from an adjoining vowel which loses its syllabicity e.g. i > y, u > w. Diphthongs may also arise from simple vowels (Donegan 1978 p. 111) but such a development seems not to have occurred in Japanese. in ongliding diphthongs the non-syllabic precedes the syllabic e.g. [ya, wa]. In off-gliding diphthongs the non-syllabic follows the syllabic e.g. [ai̯, au̯]. In mora-counting languages such as Japanese an off-gliding diphthong constitutes a long (i.e. two-mora) syllable.

2.3.2.1 On-gliding diphthongs

OJ had the following on-gliding diphthongs (Martin 1976):

ye, ya, yo, yu wi, we, wa, wo

Due to the gradually more general application of processes eliminating prevocalic glides SJ now has only:

ya, yo, yu wa

There is general agreement that the off-gliding diphthongs in SJ are [ai̯, ei̯, oi̯, ui̯] (Hattori 1960, Martin 1975, McCawley 1968) with Martin adding [au̯] as a possibility in loan words. But the phonetic basis for these assertions is not clear. Martin (1967) gives only 'morphophonemic' status to bi-moric syllables saying they have 'nothing to do with any assumed physiological manifestations (p. 247).'

133.7.7.240 (talk) 10:25, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

Genesis of this article

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

Resolved

 – Concerns of plagiarism due to confusion over a mirror of Wikipedia. No plagiarism identified in this article. Dreadstar ☥ 15:20, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

It would appear to be to quite an extent a 'lifting' of the World Lingo page on 'Japanese phonology', which helps account for the idiosyncracies of the bibliography (e.g., works listed not cited, over-reliance on a few sources, such as Akamatsu, etc.). Or at least it has been lifted from the same source that WorldLingo lifted theirs from. On the downside, that is not good because wiki pages typically come up first or very high in search results, but the article does not appear to be an originally written encyclopedia article. The good side is that the wiki article does seem to have undergone some development and revision, at least as far as description of the consonants is concerned. However, I could also hold out the other possibility--that the copyrighted World Lingo article has been lifted from the wiki article. At any rate, I actually like its more straightforward treatment of consonants over the one in the wiki article.

• http://www.worldlingo.com/ma/enwiki/en/Japanese_phonology

133.7.7.240 (talk) 06:22, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

Since you provided the link, I deleted the material you lifted from them.

WorldLingo just plagiarizes other sites. It's obvious in this case, because there was development of this article before it got to the where it is in the WorldLingo mirror; also, some things which I wrote myself appear in the WorldLingo version. — kwami (talk) 06:41, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

It's a mirror of Wikipedia, read the note at the bottom of the page: "The original article is from Wikipedia. To view the original article please click here." It's a mirror copy of an older version of our article. Dreadstar ☥ 07:12, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

I see that note now. Before all I saw was the copyright. But the mystery is, how did an article that cites so much in its bibliography come to cite so little in its explication (looks like mostly Akamatsu and Itoh used). 133.7.7.240 (talk) 11:58, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

I don't know. Maybe the person or people (not me) who added them all did so in part as a to-do list: "I've heard of these; must get around to reading them some time." -- Hoary (talk) 14:07, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

So how do we know it isn't plagiarism? Wiki is confused over why sources are important apparently. One, people who work in a given speciality need to have a flexible approach to 'common knowledge'. For example, if 3 sources agree on a fairly easily understood point, it's common knowledge. Two, sources are cited and given so people can research more deeply. Sources in and of themselves do not give credibility to anything, not for the people who actually are studying and researching a topic. The problem wiki has with sources include too much of something simply because it is online, although now wiki itself is a major source of such trouble. 133.7.7.240 (talk) 03:07, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

Do you mean plagiarized from some book not mentioned in the bibliography? We don't, of course, though considering the quality of our article, it wouldn't be much of a book. I agree that we need better citing, but even with full citations, it could still be plagiarized: it's just as easy to copy a well referenced text as an unreferenced one. — kwami (talk) 04:45, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

If you're saying that WP is intrinsically flawed in any of several ways, yes, you're right, it is. The wonder is that the result is only so bad and not a whole lot worse. Yes, WP is widely plagiarized, notably by the more witless among undergraduates. Surely no author of any book or paper on Japanese phonology, no matter how dreadful, would stoop to plagiarizing it. However, I suppose that the desperate writer of a general work on phonology, faced with a tight deadline and a demand to provide at least token coverage of a number of languages, might depend on WP. But if WP didn't exist she'd find plenty of mediocre alternatives to depend on. Yes, the careful citation within putatively credible web pages of factoids derived from WP articles, and the way in which such citation can be used to "source" the otherwise unsourced assertions within WP -- this is a danger that's well known among experienced editors of WP. -- Hoary (talk) 05:38, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia is concerned about plagiarism, but we tend to extend Good Faith to our contributors even while we do our utmost to address any problems with plagiarism. Read through Wikipedia:Plagiarism and Wikipedia:Copyright violations. If you believe there is plagiarism, address it per Wikipedia:Plagiarism#How_to_respond_to_plagiarism, and remember "An accusation of plagiarism is very serious. When dealing with plagiarism, take care to address the issue calmly and civilly. Focus on concerns about proper sourcing to give due credit."

If you have concerns about plagiarism in this article, please give specifics. If not, then focus on making improvements to the editorial content of the article. Dreadstar ☥ 05:59, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

What's most interesting now about wikipedia is even the slightest criticism brings about loads of near-irrelevant discussion. As if my reading wiki's policies was going to address the quality issues of the enterprise. Seriously folks, have you considered your wiki-mission has unbalanced you?133.7.7.240 (talk) 01:51, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

Yes I have. (Now, was there a question here about plagiarism, or are we now on to a discussion of mental imbalance?) -- Hoary (talk) 02:09, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

    >>Do you mean plagiarized from some book not mentioned in the bibliography? We don't,  
    of course, though considering the quality of our article, it wouldn't be much of a 
    book. I agree that we need better citing, but even with full citations, it could still 
    be plagiarized: it's just as easy to copy a well referenced text as an unreferenced 
    one. — kwami (talk) 04:45, 17 June 2010 (UTC)<<

Plagiarism is not necessarily the stealing of text. It could be paraphrasing in order to steal ideas without giving due credit. It happens all the time in American academia. Academics, most of them totally unoriginal, seek to be original all the time and so at least sub-consciously steal ideas. This is the more serious sort of plagiarism because it is much harder to detect. This is also most likely the reason why we live in an age of trademarks, patents, copyrights, etc. because there is simply no other way to claim ownership of an idea. 133.7.7.240 (talk) 01:55, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

For the first half of that: Yes I know (though I don't know why you single out America, to state that most academics are totally unoriginal is surely to exaggerate, and I can't see how you could call a subconscious process "theft"). The second half is an interesting notion, but this isn't the place to discuss it. ¶ And so are you saying that part of this article paraphrases some writing in order to appropriate an idea without properly crediting its author? If so, which part, and which source? ¶ Or what other request or suggestion are you making? -- Hoary (talk) 02:29, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

This page is for discussing the Japanese phonology article. If you want to talk about other Wikipedia topics, please take it to your respective User talk pages or the appropriate noticeboards. Dreadstar ☥ 02:41, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Purposeless discussion, now closed. Dreadstar ☥ 19:12, 3 July 2010 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.

Proposed expansion of discussion of J [r]s

This is to sound out what sort of objections expanding this might get. First, even a traditional phonemic account might hold that there are two J [r] phonemes, because of palatal /r/ being contrastive. Trubetskoi, a contemporary of Jakobsen, said this, although I realize a source is needed or would be helpful (although without a source one could point out lexical contrasts, such as 'roo' vs. 'ryoo'. 133.7.7.240 (talk) 11:19, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

Any reason to assume that's anything other than [ɽ] vs [ɽj]? I haven't seen people positing a palatalized series of Japanese consonants. — kwami (talk) 05:56, 27 June 2010 (UTC)

Where have I said it was anything other than a palatal r? The point is, the section on consonants, although it lists in the table (palatal approximant), doesn't discuss it. If it is a phonemic contrast of types of r's in a classical sense (as Trubetskoi discussed), couldn't we list a palatal r as among the consonants in the discussion? This is important because one reason why there might be any interest in this article is because so many people adopt a contrastive approach to phonology (a simplified form) to inform English language teaching. How many times have I had to read the error: Japanese has only one r sound. Of course it has more than one r sounds in a classical sense of 'allophone', but I'm pointing out here also in the classical sense of phoneme, too--the palatal r. Would you object if a line or two was added to the section on consonants about the palatal r? OTOH, yes, you could include a discussion of palatalization of consonants as some sort of phonological process. The article does have a rudimentary discussion of palatalization, such as it is. 133.7.7.240 (talk) 09:15, 27 June 2010 (UTC)

OK, I see where I miscommunicated here. I wasn't looking closely enough at the symbol for the palatal /j/ and thought it was an inverted r of some sort to denote a palatal r. So I would like to add palatal r symbol and a line or two about Japanese palatal r, after Trubetskoi's discussion (which I have found online at google books). So Trubetskoi is arguing along classical lines (he and Jakobsen delimited them!) that there is unitary Japanese palatal r because of the lexical contrasts. Now that has never been something Kwamigami has argued against before, so I'm not sure what the objection here is. So no he would not treat it as a two-phoneme sequence. I must add that I did 'native intuition' checks of 7 Japanese grad students and all agreed that it was both a phonetic and a phonemic contrast in all the minimal pairs we could find. If that helps the naysayers any. 133.7.7.240 (talk) 09:26, 27 June 2010 (UTC)

OK, I finally found the googlebook of Trubetskoi (needed that romanization, not Trubetskoy). It seems to me an expanded treatment of Japanese /r/ could include palatal /r'/ as a phonemic contrast, after Trubetskoi. However, this palatal, if treated as a palatal phoneme, could be treated as an apico-alveolar lateral but also as a retroflex (both seem possible) before palatalized vowels. Moreover, the article could benefit from an expansion of Japanese /r/ in terms of all its phonetically and phonologically important variations.

Here is what I suggest as sources on this. [3][4]

The voiced apico-alveolar tap [R] is generally assumed to be the prototypical realization of the liquid consonant in contemporary Japanese. According to Matsuno (1971), [R] should be considered the neutral realization of the rhotic in the language, because its articulation is central compared to other variants. However, /r/ displays a large number of social, geographical or combinatory variants. Outside of [R], the following phonetic (social or regional) realizations are widely attested: [l], [Ò], [r], [r˘], [d], [}], [L].

The apico-alveolar lateral [l] is a common variant, frequent before palatalized vowels (rya, ryu, ryo) and in young women speech (Ohnishi 1987, Tsuzuki & Lee 1992). Retroflex [Ò] is also encountered under the same conditions. The short and long apical trills, [r] and [r˘] are socially marked variants, characteristic of Tokyo popular male Japanese. The higher the number of trills, the more socially-marked the rhotic will be.

The voiced alveolar stop [d] is a combinatory variant which is frequent word-initially in certain dialects, or in children speech. It can also occur word-internally. The retroflex [}] might be encountered initially before /u/, or intervocally in sequences such as /ere/, /ara/, /uru/, /oro/ (Tsuzuki & Lee 1992). The fricative voiced lateral [L] is a combinatory variant occurring before the high vowels /i/ and /u/. It is also the most common realization of /r/ in some Ryukyuan dialects. This wide range of phonetic realizations is undoubtedly relevant to the unmarked status of /r/.

Phonetically, /r/ is also the shortest of all Japanese consonants (Kurematsu, 1997). In addition, note that whereas the phonetic quality of /r/ is frequently influenced by the surrounding vowels, /r/ itself does not seem to have any significant phonetic influence on the neighboring segments. 133.7.7.240 (talk) 10:05, 27 June 2010 (UTC)

Your 1st link supports you, and your 2nd contradicts you. One claims Japanese has palatalized consonants, and the other that it instead has palatalized vowels. I don't see any reason to suppose it has either: most descriptions just say that Japanese phonotactics allows CjV for any C but /j/ and /w/, and for any V but /e/ and /i/. Simple enough.

(And please use the IPA. Makes it much easier to read that random punctuation.) — kwami (talk) 16:58, 27 June 2010 (UTC)

I don't see a problem with presenting multiple viewpoints on Japanese phonology. Even if Trubetskoi's analysis is outdated, it's still important historically. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 17:27, 27 June 2010 (UTC)

Kwami, I don't conclude what you do. These are simply two different ways to deal with co-articulation. Trubetskoi, using the very sort of classical analysis you insisted on for diphthongs, arrives at Japanese r and palatalized r. So even you could arrive at this idea independently if you weren't so inconsistent in how you apply your idea of phonology. The second source not only provides a different way to account for it as a palatalized vowel, it still might uphold a phonemic distinction. In other words, the vowel is palatal but the variation (two were said to be possible) in the initial r sound could also be distinctive and phonemic. Finally, I don't think we need to use IPA symbols here, especially since we would probably end up in arguments over how to symbolize many sounds. It is important that we use the IPA consistently and well in the main article though. 133.7.7.240 (talk) 07:25, 28 June 2010 (UTC)

Proposed changes to the article so as to avoid reversion struggles

1. That possible vowel inventories be exanded to 10 distinct vowels, after Vance.

2. That discussion of diphthongs be expanded, after Vance.

3. That discussion of J /r/ be exanded to include the possibility of (1) two /r/ phonemes and (2) more allophones than the ones described in the article. Source would be Trubetskoi book and Labrune article.

I would point out that Vance is about the only English-language book we have that is devoted to the topic of 'Japanese phonology' (other than Akamatsu's 'functional approach') and it is a standard source on the topic (even it is limited in its approach by traditional phonemic description and doesn't make use of alternatives, such as natural phonology and articulatory phonology).

Speak now if you can't live with these. 133.7.7.240 (talk) 07:34, 28 June 2010 (UTC)

The IPA handbook also has a Japanese inventory. It has five vowels and no palatalised consonants. I don't recall it having any diphthongs either.

I object to listing 2 ar phonemes, unless we also list 2 ems, 2 bees, etc. Even then I would object, tho not so vociferously, since IMO Japanese does not have phonemic palatalization the way Russian does. As for palatalized vowels, is that supposed to be a serious proposal?

I don't have Vance, so perhaps you could post excerpts? Which diphthongs does he propose? And is there any consistency between authors as to what Japanese diphthongs are supposed to be? They would seem to be all over the place. We're back to "some authors propose that Japanese has diphthongs, but no-one can agree as to which they are". — kwami (talk) 15:56, 28 June 2010 (UTC)

1. The IPA handbook is a work of phonetics, not phonology.

2. Yes, that is a serious proposal for palatalized vowels--published by a serious linguist, whom I assuming doesn't use the moniker kwamigami at wiki.

3. You seem to have a very limited inflexible approach to this topic, which is unfortunate. Why can't you compass the idea of expanded discussion and alternative accounts (which might not agree with how to describe Japanese phonology)? And you wonder why so many people have given up on trying to improve linguistics pages at wiki?133.7.7.240 (talk) 03:30, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

And by the way I don't see this article making any use of the IPA HB for this topic anyway, so why don't you use it if you want to cite it to support your views? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 03:34, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

Of course we can, and should, cover the various approaches in the lit. That's not what you proposed. Instead, you made the utterly unfounded proposal that the C inventory needs to be modified to have two ars, which none of your sources support.

As for palatalized vowels, is there any other language in the world which people have described as having palatalized vowels? The proposal strikes me as bizarre, tho granted, perhaps only due to my ignorance. — kwami (talk) 05:00, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

I didn't get that from the anon's proposal. It seems like he is indeed proposing that we cover various approaches in the literature.

As for palatalized vowels, I have heard of analyses that talk about palatalizing vowels for various languages, which may be functionally equivalent. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 00:21, 30 June 2010 (UTC)

Kwami, it is not my idea that there is a phonemic opposition between J /r/ and J palatal /r'/, that is Trubetskoi. Also, just because something is not phonemic, that does not mean it doesn't deserve discussion under phonology. I'm not sure it's worth even trying now. YOu waste far too much time with your dogmatism and narrow-mindedness about almost everything under the topic 'linguistics'. 133.7.7.240 (talk) 08:43, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

Moraic nasal

[Ṽ] is vague. Does it mean a nasal variant of the preceding vowel or the 'random' nasal found cross-linguistically as a remnant of former post-vocalic nasals e.g. in Pekin Chinese, French, Polish or Portuguese? To be more explicit: is kanji (unless pronounced [kaɲd͡ʑi]) [kaãʑi] or [kaɯ̃ʑi] (the ɯ being unrounded [u] rather than Japanese 'compressed u')? 46.186.37.98 (talk) 00:54, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Missing phonemes

In the table f was missing, I've added that, but the French wiki gives three more fricatives. Can an expert have a look at it? Weia (talk) 20:29, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

There are no such phonemes in Japanese, and WP-fr does not claim that they're anything more than allophones. — kwami (talk) 23:05, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Moraic nasal

[Ṽ] is vague. Does it mean a nasal variant of the preceding vowel or the 'random' nasal found cross-linguistically as a remnant of former post-vocalic nasals e.g. in Pekin Chinese, French, Polish or Portuguese? To be more explicit: is kanji (unless pronounced [kaɲd͡ʑi]) [kaãʑi] or [kaɯ̃ʑi] (the ɯ being unrounded [u] rather than Japanese 'compressed u')? 46.186.37.98 (talk) 00:54, 11 July 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.6.141.51 (talk)

That needs to be dab'd by context. [Ṽ] only means a nasal vowel. — kwami (talk) 05:23, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

/dz/ versus /z/

Are these two really in free variation? My understanding is that this is only true before /u/. The reason is that just like /t/ has the allophone /ts/ before /u/, /d/ also had the allophone /dz/ before /u/ and therefore this sound only existed before that vowel. It then merged with /z/ in this environment to create a /z~dz/ phoneme (pronunciation depending on the dialect). But before any of the other vowels it's just the voiced counterpart of /s/, /z/ (illustrated by the kana writing system). This is why it's often treated as phonemically as /z/ because it's pronounced this way in most envirenments. /ʑ/ and /dʑ/ have a similar history, developing from /zi/ and /di/ respectively. But these only ever existed in the same environment so the merge was true in all situations. But /dz/ has never existed before any other vowel other than /u/, while /z/ has. Jmolina116 (talk) 22:37, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

This chart might help elaborate what I mean:

/d/ Allophones	/z/ Allophones
[da]	[za]
[dʑi]~[ʑi]
[dzu]~[zu]
[de]	[ze]
[do]	[zo]

There is no /dz/, only [dz]. [dz] and [z] are in free variation before /u/, the only place that [dz] occurs. — kwami (talk) 00:36, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

Yes, that's my point, but footnote 5 of the consonant phonemes chart "The fricative [z~ʑ] is in free variation with the affricate [dz~dʑ]. Usually, this is represented phonemically as /z/" is misleading in that it makes it seem that [z] and [dz] are in free variation everywhere. The same is true of the "IPA for Japanese" page which then gives the example /zazen/ misleading people to think that [dzadzeɴ] would be an okay pronunciation. Jmolina116 (talk) 13:16, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

I take that back. They may be in free variation everywhere. I don't recall offhand, as I don't think I know anyone who speaks that way. — kwami (talk) 09:24, 3 March 2012 (UTC)

Japanese WP has [za dʒ̪i dzu ze dzo]. — kwami (talk) 09:29, 3 March 2012 (UTC)

I'm not convinced by [dzo] from my own experiences, but I saw that on the Japanese WP too, so that might be so. Either way I think something should be said about this, even if it's just a small aside like "but not in all environments" for some clarification. And on the IPA page, perhaps the example /zazen/ should be changed to something that will for sure work like /zutto/. Just a suggestion. Jmolina116 (talk) 02:28, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

We shouldn't say that unless we know it to be true. — kwami (talk) 20:34, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

[dz], phonetically the voiced counterpart of [ts] which occurs before [e], [a], [o] and [ɯ], but not before [i]. (p 135) In postpausal context, [dz] is known to be general, though [z] occurs in the speech of some Japanese. In intervocalic context, it is [z] rather than [dz] that is more common. (p 81#5) [Tsutomu Akamatsu, Japanese phonology: a functional approach, 2000]

That source also says the palatalized versions are [cɕ] and [ɟʑ]. Do we ever really get fricative [ʑ]? — kwami (talk) 20:41, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

According to the Yotsugana, it is used as an alternative. It's also more common in Kansai and is used in Kagoshima where it's distinguished from /dʑ/ phonemically. But I would agree that in the standard Tokyo dialect [dʑ] is way more common if not used exclusively. Though it's good to know [dz] can be used anywhere. I was unaware. Jmolina116 (talk) 18:27, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

Phonemes

The list should include f, sh, ch, ts, and j. Sh, ch, and j can contrast with s, t, and d/z before a, o, or u (e.g. しゃ, sha, vs. さ, sa). They are clearly separate phonemes. --108.227.31.161 (talk) 19:20, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

The phonemicity is not so clear. Those are most often considered allophones of other sounds, though there may be sources that make the case that the adoption of loanwords makes these marginal phonemes. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 19:48, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

Younger speakers are more exposed to, and more comfortable with, English phonetics and borrowings. /t/ is a single phoneme for older speakers, whether pronounced [t] or [t͡ɕ] or [t͡s] (and most older speakers will use [t͡ɕi] for /ti/ and [t͡su͍] for /tu/). However, for younger speakers, /t/ and /ch/ and /ts/ are distinct, as noted by more recent katakana renderings such as ティ to represent the [ti] sound, as opposed to チ for [t͡ɕi], or トゥ to represent the [tu͍] sound, as opposed to ツ for [t͡su͍].

Similarly for /f/, which only ever appears as bilabial [ɸ] before /u/ in native Japanese words, but which can appear as a distinct phoneme before other vowels in borrowed words, such as ファン ([ɸa̠ɴ] "fan"), which is contrastive with ハン ([ha̠ɴ], "group", "half", "anti-", "fief", "cooked rice", etc. depending on context).

/s/ is a special case, as there is still no [si] in modern Japanese, and even younger speakers generally cannot distinguish this from [ɕi], nor can they easily make the [si] sound. (This causes no end of humor/embarrassment when discussing the English verb "sit"). [s] is contrastive with [ɕ] for the other four vowels, however, with [ɕ] generally taking a slight palatalization, so we have [sa̠] and [ɕʲa̠], [su͍] and [ɕʲu͍], [se̞] and [ɕʲe̞] ([ɕʲe̞] only in borrowed words, such as シェア "share"), [so̞] and [ɕʲo̞]. The palatalization arises as [ɕ] appears to have arisen out of [s] + a front vowel + another vowel, as indicated by the historical kana spelling せう (se u -> modern [ɕʲo̞]), and the modern kana spellings しゃ, しゅ, しょ (shi + small ya, yu, yo -> modern [ɕʲa̠], [ɕʲu͍], [ɕʲo̞], with [ɕi] arising out of a palatalization of possible older [si], much as happens in English "fission").

/di/ can be contrastive with /ji/ among younger speakers, appearing as [di] and [d͡ʑi], and generally spelled in katakana as ディ and ジ. /du/ can similarly contrast with /zu/, appearing as [du͍] and [zu͍], and ドゥ and ズ. For the other three vowels, /d/ and /j/ have been contrastive for many centuries at least.

HTH, -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 16:46, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

For many speakers, ファン is pronounced /huaɴ/. — kwami (talk) 17:30, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps older speakers? Among younger speakers, I've heard [ɸa̠ɴ], sometimes [ɸʷa̠ɴ], but specifically not [ɸu͍a̠ɴ], in order to distinguish between ファン ([ɸa̠ɴ], "a fan") and 不安 ([ɸu͍a̠ɴ], "unease"). -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 21:10, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

The standard IPA symbol for plain labialization is [ʷ]. [ᵝ] is not standard IPA. Though I understand the usefulness of ad hoc transcriptions, [ᵝ] is being used to imply labialization when [ʷ] is already the standard symbol for general labialization (with or without roundedness context). If we want to describe a specific kind of labialization without lip rounding, why not use [u͍] and [w͍], as we had before? - Gilgamesh (talk) 17:26, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

While u box and w box might be fine, I don't have a problem with a somewhat non-standard IPA transcription, particularly one that has salience in the literature. That's the case with [ᵝ], right? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 14:34, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

/ŋ/ vs /N/

I can't seem to find any agreement on the pronunciation of the Japanese ん. Some say it is /ŋ/ and others, including this article, say /N/. In my 6 years of experience studying Japanese however, neither of these seem correct, but /ŋ/ sounds the closest. After listening to the sounds of the IPA chart and comparing them to the sounds of Japanese there are a lot of sounds--much like this one--that do not match their IPA transcriptions, so I'm a bit puzzled. (75.65.220.204 (talk) 19:29, 5 March 2013 (UTC))

It will appear to be different sounds depending on the phoneme following it. It is definitely not /ŋ/, though it may become /ŋ/ depending on if a velar stop follows it. Check out Japanese phonology#Moraic nasal. ん is a sound that tries its best not to be pinned down. Curly Turkey (gobble) 00:04, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

Moraic nasal

I put a fact tag on the statement "Even when the nasal coda is proposed as /N/, it is in a complementary distribution with the nasal onsets within a syllable." That might seem obvious, but Labrune (2012) has this statement: "Another notable fact about /N/ is that it can never be linked to an onset position before a vowel. It can never be resyllabified either." (p. 132) Unfortunately, the Google preview is cut off before that can be elaborated on. Am I understanding this correctly as potentially contradicting the statement I just tagged or am I misreading this passage? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 01:40, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

What's that first quote trying to say? That, say, /naN/ can be either [naɴ] or [nan]? wut? Either way, I don't see what it's got to do with the quote from the book. --Lfdder (talk) 10:31, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Complementary distribution is one of the measures of phonemicity. [ɴ], because it never appears in the syllable onset, could be conceived of as a coda allophone of /m/ or /n/. I've read similar statements about French approximants being in complementary distribution with corresponding high vowels. Another powerful (though, if I understand correctly, rare) measure is whether the sounds replace each other upon suffixation. If adding a suffix to a word ending in the moraic nasal doesn't come with a resyllabification, then that would speak to it being a phoneme with limited distribution, much like English /ŋ/. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 14:45, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

It's not necessarily [ɴ] word finally. The lips may be closed ([ɴ͡m]?) and there are numerous other variants between speakers and dialects. It doesn't seem to be constrained to be anything in particular, though AFAICT it's never a plain [n] or [m]. If you're going to argue it's /n/, then you'd need to specify syllable boundaries; if you have it /N/, then you don't need to. — kwami (talk) 14:54, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Having to determine syllable boundaries wouldn't be a compelling reason to argue for a novel phoneme. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 15:00, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

the not-quite colon

We read:

The sokuon can be noted in IPA with a ː mark instead of a doubled consonant (i.e. [nʲipːõɴ] instead of [nʲip.põɴ], [kasːẽɴ] instead [kas.sẽɴ], etc.). However, this notation obscures a potential syllable boundary.

As I'm not a phonologist I'm reluctant to tamper with the article. But first I wonder if "a potential" shouldn't be simply "the"; because offhand I can't think where it might occur other than at a syllable boundary. Secondly, it appears to an unsuspecting reader who's not very sharp-eyed that this is a colon; but of course it isn't, it's instead -- ideally, if not always in practice -- the triangular thing that WP describes somewhat awkwardly in Colon_(punctuation)#IPA_Diacritical_usage. Not having at hand my copy of Ladusaw and Pullum's splendid little book, I can't immediately look up what it's called.

Incidentally, my hazy understanding of the conventional/correct use for other languages of this quasi-colon may be even worse than I think, but FWIW it seems very dodgy for gemination in Japanese. (Isn't there something a lot closer to actual lengthening in, say, Finnish?) However, if it is used for Japanese by a non-trivial percentage of phonologists, then yes the article should explain it (just as it should explain the commonly encountered "Q"). Though again, the article could profitably give a reference for its use.

(OT, but I marvel at the fastidiousness of the representation "[nʲip.põɴ]". Yes I do understand the tilde and yes it's correct. But is there a language with non-nasalized [o] before a nasal coda?) -- Hoary (talk) 11:05, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

There's several mentions of syllables in the article, but the only thing the section on phonotactics has to say about syllables in Japanese is: "In the same way that English words are divided into syllables, Japanese words are divided into moras ...". I'm not sure how much truth there is to that. It's my understanding that, even though Japanese phonologists don't like to talk much about syllables, they don't generally equate them to moras, either. Anyway, the use of <ː> seems to stem from this sort of rejection of syllables in Japanese--I think. Hopefully, someone with more knowledge in Japanese phonotactics will chime in. --Lfdder (talk) 11:30, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

I haven't encountered a phonologist who denies that Japanese has syllables or who says that morae are syllables. I think we can assume that it has syllables. -- Hoary (talk) 13:47, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

From Labrune (2012): "It is only recently that the syllable has been assumed by a number of modern phonologists to be a fundamental unit that cannot be dispensed within the analysis of Standard Japanese alongside the mora ..." --Lfdder (talk) 13:55, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

The syllable is important in some Kyushu dialects. In Standard and Kansai Japanese it's largely irrelevant: defining the syllable isn't obvious, because it doesn't really do much of anything. For tone assignment etc. it's the mora that's important. The syllable isn't a universal feature of languages, though FAIK it may have its role here too. — kwami (talk) 14:59, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

The table of "IPA" sounds...

I find some parts of the table of consonant sounds rather baffling. [ɸ] isn't mentioned, despite this being the consonant sound of ふ. Sure it's mentioned in a footnote, but while that may be be okay for the stuff described in the "phonological processes"-section, I don't see how this is ...and [Q] isn't the IPA letter for a glottal stop, nor indeed anything else, as [Q] doesn't seem to exist in IPA. Also, if consonant gemination is allowed into the table, why isn't [ɸ] in it!?

Also, the reason I've checked this section, is because I'm trying to teach myself the Japanese R/L-sound. There are some contradictory and confusing issues, concerning the R/L-sound, as describes on this article, however:

• The table here places it as a "post-aleovar flap" (looking at the table for consonant sounds, in the IPA article, such a thing doesn't seem to even exist)
• The footnote describes it as being either an alveolar lateral flap (ɺ) or an alveolar flap (ɾ), despite neither of those being post-aleovar. The article for alveolar lateral flap further states that "Some languages which are described as having a lateral flap, such as Japanese, actually have a flap which is indeterminant as to centrality, and may surface as either central or lateral/.../", further confirming this.
• The letter used in the table is that of a retroflex flap (ɽ). A retroflex flap is neither alveolar lateral flap, alveolar flap nor can it in any way be described to be something between these.

This article needs some work...--ZarlanTheGreen (talk) 23:55, 24 March 2013 (UTC)

"despite this being the consonant sound of ふ." The author is of the opinion that it's an allophone of /h/ regardless.

"and [Q] isn't the IPA letter for a glottal stop, nor indeed anything else, as [Q] doesn't seem to exist in IPA" There's no IPA letter for it cos it's not any one consonant in particular. I suppose that it would be better to put it under a new column "placeless" or something like that.

"if consonant gemination is allowed into the table, why isn't [ɸ] in it!?" That's because gemination is phonemic.

"... such a thing doesn't seem to even exist" Apical post-alveolars are retroflex, depending on who you ask.

"The footnote describes it as being either an alveolar lateral flap (ɺ) or an alveolar flap (ɾ) ..." It says that the pronunciation "varies" between these, i.e. that they're allophones. I suppose that that bit could be rewritten for clarity.

I think that there are some things that could perhaps be made clearer in the article. It sometimes feels a bit like someone's tried really hard to fit Japanese into whatever phonological framework they've had in mind--but this is just my opinion. --Lfdder (talk) 00:53, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, it is a little strange that "gemination" is considered a phoneme worthy of being put in the consonant table here, but not at Italian phonology. Part of it might be an attempt to have easy-to-describe phonotactic constraints. Is there variance in phonological analyses of Japanese? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 01:35, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

Well, ya, it does depend on the phonotactic analysis--though Italian phonology doesn't really seem to touch upon this. Another example is Cypriot Greek, where phonotactics mean geminates have to be thought of as distinct consonants. I don't know if there's much variance between analyses of Japanese. --Lfdder (talk) 12:25, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

On what basis would [ɸ] be regarded as an allophone of [h]? は,ひ,へ and ほ use [h] and always [h], but ふ uses [ɸ] and always [ɸ]. [h] is never used where [ɸ] would/could be, nor vice-versa, as far as I know. Is this not the case of the author, simply being wrong?

"There's no IPA letter for it", you say? Clearly you didn't check the table of consonants on the article on IPA, nor the article on glottal stop, before saying that. The IPA letter for it is clearly [ʔ].

Gemination is included, but not [ɸ], because gemination phonemic? That would imply that [ɸ] isn't phonemic. How so? (and what exactly do you mean by phonemic? I hadn't seen the word before. I checked wiktionary and did a quick google, but I can't be sure how exactly it is being used here)

"Apical post-alveolars are retroflex, depending on who you ask." ... Okay fine, but it should still be more clear (i.e. say retroflex). Either way, it's really only something I pointed out in passing.

"It says that the pronunciation "varies" between these, i.e. that they're allophones." Yes I know. The lack of clarity here, was on my part. I suspected that what I wrote might be a bit unclear. I am not as eloquent as I would like to be...

--ZarlanTheGreen (talk) 01:46, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

Oh, goodness, there's a bit of phonology 101 schooling that you'll need to fully understand the nuances, but basically a phoneme is a language-specific "sound" that is actually multiple sounds that appear in different contexts but are considered the same by language speakers (allophones). [ɸ] is an allophone of a phoneme normally transcribed in IPA as /h/ before /ɯ/, so [h] is never found before /ɯ/ and [ɸ] is only found before /ɯ/; speakers of Japanese consider the two sounds to be one sound and won't necessarily even notice the difference, though a speaker of English or Spanish will always hear the difference. Note the difference in notation, /slashes/ indicate phonemes and [brackets] phones/allophones.

The Q is not supposed to be a glottal stop, it's supposed to represent a number of sounds and, according to the analysis, is unspecified for place of articulation. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 03:07, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

"Oh, goodness, there's a bit of phonology 101 schooling that you'll need to fully understand the nuances" Indeed. I am a bit of a newbie in the subject. This I have far from denied. I am quite thankful that you are willing to explain. I have learned some parts though, and most new details are far from hard to grasp (even when they can be hard to put into practice, in terms of pronunciation).

I already understood what a phoneme is (and also allophone, though only somewhat recently), but I appreciate you going through all the basics, to be sure that it's all understood. Thank you for the explanation of when/why slashes are used. That had me rather confused, until now. I am pleased to note that my own use hasn't been wrong, as I have really only tried to represent phones, rather than phonemes. I would like to point out, however, that your own use of slashes/brackets, seem inconsistent. You use "/ɯ/", for example, which makes no sense. [ɯ], to represent the phone would make sense, but it's not the phoneme, as far as I can tell.

You say that Japanese consider [h] and [ɸ] as the same sound and won't necessarily even notice the difference? Well, if that is true, it would indeed make them allophones, true. I am, however, rather sceptical of that claim. I am not willing to accept that [h] and [ɸ] are seen as the same sound by the Japanese, nor that they won't necessarily even notice the difference. It is my impression that, that very much isn't the case. Also, I have a problem with how you express yourself: "[ɸ] is only found before /ɯ/"? No. To say that [ɸ] is only found in ふ/フ (fu), would be a more accurate way of saying it. To say it like you did, is misleading, IMO. Also it is seems to me to be, clearly and obviously, wrong: ふぁ/ファ (fa), ふぃ/フィ (fi), ふぇ/フェ (fe) and ふぉ/フォ (fo) are cases where [ɸ] occurs without /u/. The Japanese seem to have no trouble with these, and differentiating them from は (ha), ひ (hi), へ (he) and ほ (ho), from what I can tell. This would rather defeat the notion that the Japanese see [h] and [ɸ] as the same, and don't particularly notice a difference.

As to "Q" and glottal stops... "it's supposed to represent a number of sounds", you say? Is it really? Certainly it seems to do so, no more than [ʔ] does, as far as I can understand. As to the "place of articulation" being unspecified.... [ʔ] doesn't have a specified place of articulation. In fact, if I have understood it correctly, the whole concept of "place of articulation", is inapplicable. It would be the glottis, if anything. It rather seems to me that you don't seem to have understood the nature of glottal stops. If not, please do explain.--ZarlanTheGreen (talk) 16:42, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

It would not be more accurate to say that [ɸ] is only found in ふ/フ/fu, because the latter trio are orthographic representations of speech; it's possible to talk about sounds using orthography, but phonologists typically eschew this. It does appear that [ɸ] may also occur before other vowels in words borrowed from other languages. I don't know if speakers have difficulty with this or not (I have heard the converse, difficulty with [h] before [ɯ]), if a large number of speakers are able to pronounce these with no trouble, then the sound may be becoming phonemicized and IMHO would be worthy of inclusion in the chart. The matter might be similar with [ɕ]. I'm sure there's sourcing that says either way.

Q in the chart represents gemination, not a glottal stop. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 17:13, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

ふ shouldn't be used? Fine, [ɸɯ] then. My point still stands.

On what grounds do you claim that [ɸ] and [h] are indistinct from each other in Japanese? Both sounds exist in Japanese, that cannot be argued. On what grounds do you exclude [ɸ] from the chart? (well I know that, but what grounds do you have to claim that it's true). Lacking verification on this point, we can only conclude that the phone exists in Japanese, and that there is no verified reason to treat is as an allophone, thus meaning that there is no reason to exclude it from the table.

As to Q in the chart representing gemination, not a glottal stop... it's put there as a stop, and as glottal and on what grounds do you claim that "gemination" and "glottal stop" are two mutually exclusive categories (there are certainly languages where gemination is done with glottal stops, whether Japanese is one or not)? Actually, most cases of gemination don't involve a separate sound at all, but simply a lengthening of the phone.--ZarlanTheGreen (talk) 01:05, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

• As a long-time student of Japanese, I'd like to chime in a bit and say that [ɸ] is becoming phonemicized, mostly among younger speakers and (so far as I can tell) only in cases where [ɸ] is not followed by [ɯ]. As such, imported words like fan are spelled as ファン; younger speakers will pronounce this roughly as [ɸãɴ], while older speakers will pronounce something closer to [ɸɰãɴ] with a noticeable glide. Note that in both cases speakers will try to keep this distinct from [ɸɯãɴ] with the fully-pronounced [ɯ], as that then sounds like 不安 ("uneasiness, instability").

Note that [ɸ] and [h] are still fully allophonic when followed by [ɯ]. Japanese speakers often pronounce /hu/ sounds in borrowed words as /ho/ if it's important to preserve the /h/ sound. For example, the Spanish name Juan often comes out as [ho̞ãɴ].

HTH, -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 19:27, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

Sounds reasonable and believable ...and would support putting [ɸ] in the table, as it is not an allophone, or at least not always or to everyone. However: can you verify that?--ZarlanTheGreen (talk) 01:05, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

As mentioned here: User_talk:Lfdder#About_your_editing_of_Japanese_phonology..., there's already a (sourced) claim in the article that [h] and [ɸ], and [t] and [ts] are distinct in loanwords. --Lfdder (talk) 11:35, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

If they are distinct in loanwords, that would mean that Japanese are fully able to distinguish between them, and that they do not see them as "one sound" or allophones. Thus showing that there is no reason for exclusion from the table. This, along with the fact that the burden of evidence in the issue, is on those who claim that the phones should be excluded (a burden that hasn't been met ...indeed, there are barely any verification, of anything at all, in the article), would seem to indicate that [ɸ] must be put into the table.

That should, I hope, settle the issue of the Japanese "F" (if all agree, we can fix the article accordingly, straight away) ...but the issues of the R, and of Q/gemination are still unresolved.--ZarlanTheGreen (talk) 20:39, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

The Q thing can probably be addressed with further research/sourcing. Does anyone disagree that [ɸ and [ts should be added to the table with parenthetical notes? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 20:45, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

The issue of Q doesn't not seem to be backed by any sources. Thus, given that Wikipedia requires that things on it's pages be verified, should not Q be removed, until such further research/sourcing has been done? At the moment, I don't see how there are any good reasons to have it in the page. It the issue of gemination needs to be addressed, certainly, but that isn't an excuse to include, or keep, unverified speculation and/or original research. Once the quite necessary further research/sourcing has been done, the relevant information can be properly included.

I would certainly agree that [ɸ] should have a footnote, but [ts]? When dealing with phones (as we are, if we use brackets, as you have explained), [t] and [s] are already in the table, so I don't understand why one should include [ts] (never mind the fact that it's not an individual phone), but when looking at phonemes I guess /ts/ could perhaps be regarded as a phoneme, but is it? I have no idea if it is or not, but again: It needs to be verified.--ZarlanTheGreen (talk) 21:18, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

"I would certainly agree that [ɸ] should have a footnote, but [ts]? When dealing with phones ..." If it's an affricate [ then yes, it would deserve to go in the table. --Lfdder (talk) 21:36, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

Interesting. Yeah, I'd agree that it would deserve a place in the table, and as a phone, if it's a voiceless alveolar affricate (i.e. [), which I rather suspect that it probably is.--ZarlanTheGreen (talk) 01:43, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Here is a Google preview of Labrune (2012), which discusses /Q/. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 20:53, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

According to that source, Q doesn't exist as a phone or phoneme or anything like that. It describes Q as essentially a symbol for gemination, or more accurately, for the sound that occurs when a sokuon (っ) is used. Phonetically speaking, gemination is either done by simply having the consonant twice (as in kissaten [kissateN] which is shown in said book) or with an unreleased stop for stops (like kappa [kap̚pa], again from the book) or as a glottal stop, when it's "before a pause" (generally when you have a sokuon at the end). Q is thus a useful symbol to use, to represent the sokuon, in discussing Japanese phonology, but it is not actually a phone or phoneme. It is useful to use Q in explaining gemination, but it has no place in the table. [ʔ] might, but Q certainly doesn't.--ZarlanTheGreen (talk) 01:16, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

From the book, "Japanese scholars generally associate under the label 'special phonemes' (tokushu onso [kanji characters]), 'special rhythmic units'... or 'mora phonemes'... three phonological elements which exhibit special phonological characteristics, the most significant one lying in the fact that they are moraic." (p. 132) He refers to them as "segments" and they are represented between slashes. Just like every other phoneme, /Q/ is a collection of phones. The difference is that the character used to represent it the phoneme is not IPA, but that's not a requirement. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 13:13, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

What you quoted was not a statement that Q was a phoneme. If it were, I would have to accept that it is what the source says (though not that it is true), and thus that it can be used in the article, even though I'd still disagree with it. Wikipedia demands verifiability, not truth (and I do see the sense in that policy, though it sounds foolish and counter-intuitive, on its face) ...unless it can be countered by other sources, that is.

In the word kappa, I would argue that the phonemes are /kappa/, not /kaQpa/, with the same being true of all other cases of gemination as well (except with "n", as noted below). I see no reason to claim, or believe, otherwise. Q is useful, and it is useful to place it where you would place a phoneme, to show how gemination occurs. I cannot see how it can be classified as a phoneme, however.

In case you would like to object with the fact that min'na (みんな) is different from minna (みっな): It's quite true that they are different. Minna has the first "n" simply flow on twice as long, whereas there is a very noticeable separation, a pause or a stop (colloquially speaking. Dunno what exact phonological term applies) between the "min" and the "na", or more importantly between the first and second "n", in min'na. This is, however, due to the "n" of ん, being different from the "n" in な, in terms of phonemes. This is confirmed by the book, which classifies ん as /N/, but the [n] of な as /n/, thus meaning that min'na (みんな) is shown as /miNna/ and not /minna/. Also by the fact of it's placement/treatment, in the table of kana. ん is quite separate from the characters な, に, ぬ, ね and の, and is treated as separate.--ZarlanTheGreen (talk) 05:51, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

No linguist, not even an undergraduate, would look at the above passages and doubt that the authors are arguing that /Q/ is a phoneme. I think that the other editors would agree that this is the interpretation of the authors, who also say that it is a common one across the discipline. I could peg this as you being inexperienced in the discipline, but I've learned enough about how people's cognitive biases affect how they take in new ideas to see what's going on here.

Look, I get it, and you don't have to feel embarrassed. You don't like the interpretation of /Q/ as a phoneme. I'm not a fan of it either, but the best way to address this is to look at how sources tend to treat the issue, not resetting the goal posts every time an inconvenient source says something you don't like. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 14:03, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

"No linguist, not even an undergraduate, would look at the above passages and doubt that the authors are arguing that /Q/ is a phoneme." I take it that is an admission that you cannot find a better quote then? Remember, this is not an encyclopaedia by and for linguists.

Please note what is written in Wikipedia:No_original_research#Primary.2C_secondary_and_tertiary_sources: Anything that would require you to be able to interpret it, especially anything that would require the help of specialized education, is not good enough, as a source for wikipedia. Not by itself, anyway. The article and the sources, need to be understandable to a layman.

Please demonstrate that the source says what you say it does. If it does, fine. I'll still personally say that Q isn't a phoneme, but for wikipedia I'll have to accept it.

"Look, I get it, and you don't have to feel embarrassed." Embarrassed? What have I done, for which I should possibly feel embarrassed? You on the other hand, should be embarrassed to be speaking in such a condescending manner. Uncivil behaviour doesn't improve wikipedia. Behave yourself, please.--ZarlanTheGreen (talk) 16:01, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

The embarrassing thing is having your irrationalities pointed out. People tend to resist changing their minds about firmly held preconceived ideas and there are various ways this manifests. One of them is higher scrutiny to ideas that challenge one's beliefs. In this case, we have a source saying "scholars call this a 'special phoneme' or 'mora phoneme'" and you have said "that's not a statement that Q is a phoneme."

It's also embarrassing to be called out on your ignorance. I'm not going to dwell on this, but I do get the impression that you have little to no training in the field. The "anybody can edit" ethic is fine enough when it gets people editing in areas they're familiar with. But, when someone acts like they know more than they really do, they become what's called Randy in Boise. I'd like to disabuse you of that tactic if I can.

I also have to call you out on your misreading of Wikipedia's policies on sourcing; it is most assuredly not true that sources "need to be understandable to a layman." That would set an absurd standard for Wikipedia. The link to the subsection of WP:OR that you provided is in regard to analysis of primary sources. In this case, the only "analysis" needed to understand the source as backing up the statement you challenge is an understanding that what comes between slashes is a phoneme.

There's really no gentle way of telling you that you're wrong here. If you really perceive my tone as condescending or uncivil, I apologize. If you're only pretending outrage to try to "scare" me into not challenging you, lest it might be perceived as "uncivil", I'll have none of that. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 16:50, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Your quote of the source did not include any part saying that Q, specifically, was such a phoneme. Indeed, it did not identify any of the said special phonemes. ...and even if that were so... actually, never-mind. That issue seems to be settled now, so why bother.

If someone is able to show me that I am wrong. I acknowledge it, and thank the person. I do not, as a rule, get embarrassed. Why you think that one has to have been irrational (which would be embarrassing), to be wrong, I do not understand.

As to the Dunning-kruger effect, it has to do with people who are ignorant and unaware of it. Thus I fail to see how it would apply to me, in this instance.--ZarlanTheGreen (talk) 20:40, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

What in the world is "みっな"? Are you arguing that it forms a minimal pain with みんな? — kwami (talk) 06:30, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

I never claimed that there is such a thing as a Japanese word like "みっな". It's not like you can't write or pronounce anything other then already pre-existing words.--ZarlanTheGreen (talk) 16:01, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

kwami meant to say minimal pair. --Lfdder (talk) 12:41, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Can't we just use the table from Okada (1991) with a note that there are various different interpretations? There's talk about the phonemic status of /Q/, [ɸ] and [ts] further down in the article. Let's not make things complicated. --Lfdder (talk) 13:00, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

What possible reason would there be, to avoid the issues of [ɸ] and [ts]? There is already consensus on those, isn't there? Unanimity even, unless I am much mistaken.

Q is still debated, and the R/L issue hasn't really been discussed (but I thought I'd let it be for now, as we have enough to deal with for the moment anyway), but I see no reason to be so impatient. There is still plenty of time to discuss. It's only been a few days since the discussion started.--ZarlanTheGreen (talk) 16:01, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Are you looking to improve the article in any meaningful way? There aren't any glaring errors with the consonant table. This is becoming very silly.

So, to get this over with... There's a consonant table in both Okada (1991) and Labrune (2012). /Q/ isn't in either of them. I suggest taking /Q/ out of our table and putting [ɸ] and [ts] in (with an accompanying note in the spirit of Japanese_phonology#Palatalization_and_affrication). Does anyone oppose this? --Lfdder (talk) 17:15, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

I'm fine with that. We can probably even limit the use of /Q/ to the discussion of gemination. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 17:29, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

The issue of [ɸ], [t͡s] and Q, being or not being in the table are significant issues. Calling it inconsequential, rather sounds like you do not consider the accuracy of wikipedia articles to be of consequence (which makes me wonder why you bother to edit them). As to your suggestion of removing Q and including [ɸ] and [t͡s], however, I'm all for it. Since Ƶ§œš¹ agrees, I'd say that makes it unanimous (unless someone comes in and objects, really soon). Either way, it definitely qualifies as consensus.

Thus all those issues have been discussed and resolved. I am glad that the discussion went so well, with a fairly quick resolution, for which I thank you all. Especially Lfdder for your latest comment, which brought this to a close, that much sooner.

Now the modifications to the article that Lfdder has just suggested can be done straight away!

...and with those issues out of the way we can deal with the one issue that has been ignored so far: The R/L sound.

The footnote speaks of it being an allophone of alveolar lateral flap and alveolar flap, which is confirmed by the articles for both those sounds and the page for rhotic consonant. The table shows a retroflex flap (the article for it seems to suggest it being an allophone together with the other two flaps mentioned). This is rather muddled and confusing. What is correct?--ZarlanTheGreen (talk) 20:40, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

If we're going to remove /Q/, we should also remove /N/. They're analogous.

If we're going to include /f/ and /ts/, they should be in parentheses to indicate their marginal status.

/r/ is a post-alveolar flap undefined by centrality. It's impossible to write in IPA, which requires you to choose central or lateral. — kwami (talk) 21:21, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

That's /ɴ/ in the table, not /N/. --Lfdder (talk) 21:40, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Okay, it seems there are a few more issues to discuss, so no consensus quite yet.

In what way is /N/ analogous? /N/ is considered separate from the /n/ of na, ni, nu, ne and no syllables, by the Japanese, and there are phonetic differences as well. Saying that /f/ and /ts/ (or rather /ɸ/ and /t͡s/) have a marginal status, is a good point. I'd agree with having them in parentheses, as well as footnotes. As to the R/L sound... No one has suggested that it has to be one single phone (i.e. a single IPA sound). It may be an allophone. That is to say a sound which is a single sound in the language, but which is technically any of several sounds in IPA (or anything in-between the sounds) which can be used interchangeably. The issue is which sound/sounds, that the R/L sound is.--ZarlanTheGreen (talk) 17:56, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

/N/ is analagous because it only appears in the syllable coda and assimilates features of a following consonant. It's one of the three "mora phonemes" that Labrune (2012) talks about.

I don't understand the issue that you have with the presentation of the Japanese rhotic. We represent it as ɽ between slashes and the two main allophones (ɾ and ɺ) in brackets. If you think we should pick one of the allophones to represent the rhotic in phonemic transcription, I can get behind that... but I'm not sure what you're confused/concerned about. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 18:11, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

We could just have ɽ~ɾ~ɺ in the table if there's no clear phoneme. --Lfdder (talk) 18:54, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

But we're not going to use the trio every time we present a phonemic transcription of a word. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 22:21, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

Well, this doesn't seem to be an issue over at Korean or Arabic phonology, though they seem to distinguish between phonemes and what-have-yous-es (that is, morphophonemes). Either way, I don't know what would be best here. --Lfdder (talk) 23:03, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

It's not uncommon for us to show /A ~ B/ when no one allophone is dominant, or when one is so divergent that it would be hard for most readers to associate them (such as /t ~ s/, or /g ~ n/). It's not that there's no clear phoneme – /r/ is just as clear as any other – it's that there's no good IPA letter for it. — kwami (talk) 23:22, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

Essentially I don't feel that it make sense to represent a phoneme with a letter used for a phone, where that phone isn't one of the phones of the phoneme. Having the rhotic phoneme be represented with ɽ, when that represents a sound, but that isn't a sound that is used for the phoneme, is confusing and misleading. Are you saying that the rhotic phoneme is just the sounds [ɾ] and [ɺ], then? And [ɽ] isn't? If so, I'd suggest using one of them. I'd even consider /r/ to be better (it would be wrong, phone-wise, but would rather show that it's a rhotic sound. It'd still be wrong, though) As to N... Meh, whatever. Include it or don't. I'm don't really care that much about N anymore (for now, anyway).--ZarlanTheGreen (talk) 09:22, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Well, we could probably have something like [ɽ̟] or [ɽ̺]--or I don't know what--but we don't need to be that specific with representing phonemes. Think of it a bit like how we use /t/ for the laminal denti-alveolar [t̪~t̻]. As long as its "exact" pronunciation is established somewhere--which it is--I don't see much of an issue. "Are you saying that the rhotic phoneme is just ..." All 3 occur. --Lfdder (talk) 11:30, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

If all three occur, then it would make sense to use ɽ (or either of ɾ or ɺ), certainly. That would, however, mean that there is a problem with the footnote, which only claims that the rhotic phoneme is [ɾ] and/or [ɺ], indicating that [ɽ] doesn't occur (which is contradicted by the table, which uses ɽ).

There is a contradiction, either way. If the r-sound is an allophone which includes [ɽ], then the footnote is wrong. If the r-sound is never [ɽ], then the table is wrong.

So... Is the rhotic phoneme [ɾ] and [ɺ]? Is it [ɾ], [ɺ] and [ɽ]? Is it some other phone or set of phones? You say it's all three mentioned sounds. Are there other opinions? ...and, more importantly, what do the sources say?--ZarlanTheGreen (talk) 04:46, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

• Just in terms of what I hear around me, the rough inventory is [ɺ̠ä] [ɾi] [ɾ̠ɯᵝ] [ɺ̠e̞] [ɺ̠o̞]. /re/ is sometimes realized more like [ɾe̞]. Note that this is only my personal experience.

I note that the article only ever uses /ɽ/, and does not use [ɽ]. I suspect that this is an important distinction. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 05:31, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Well the point about what you've heard... As you say, it's only your experience. Still, I did ask for other opinions, so I guess it is pretty much what I asked for. Nevertheless, it isn't really relevant for what should, or shouldn't, be on wikipedia.

As to the use of slashes versus brackets, there is a significant distinction, which has been covered in this discussion. Actually, you seem to have obeyed this distinction in your comment, but just in case: Slashes represent phonemes, while brackets represent phones. A phone is an individual sound. A phoneme is an individual sound, within a language, which isn't necessarily always the exact same sound. The same phoneme can be pronounced slightly differently, in different occasions, or it may be that one or two sounds can be used interchangeably (i.e. an allophone).

Thus it is correct that slashes are used in the article, as it deals with the phoneme, and equally correct that brackets are used here, as we are discussing the phones.--ZarlanTheGreen (talk) 06:41, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

It's a similar issue with /u/, which is always [ɯᵝ] and never [u], the important difference being that the symbol for the phoneme is easier to type and more in line with what's used in romanization. The phoneme symbol for the rhotic is also of a phone that does not occur in Japanese, and is also not closer to the romanization (nor how the sound is normally transcribed phonemically). — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 12:03, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

I take it from that, that you are saying that the rhotic phoneme is [ɾ] and [ɺ], but not [ɽ]?

I don't quite understand why you would say that it's similar to the issue of /u/ and [ɯᵝ], however, given that you also point out none of the reasons for using /u/ for the phoneme (as opposed to /ɯᵝ/ or, more simply, /ɯ/), apply to the issue of the rhotic phoneme (such an approach could only possibly lead one to use /r/, but I feel [though I could be wrong, of course] that there is a much more significant loss of accuracy there, than with u/ɯ). In what way is it similar, then? Have I completely misunderstood what you are saying is similar?--ZarlanTheGreen (talk) 09:04, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

The article is saying that the rhotic phoneme is [ɾ] and [ɺ], but not [ɽ]. Looking through the article history, it seems that there was difficulty in deciding which symbol to use for phoneme until 2009 when Kwamikagami changed it to ɽ. So, although /u/ is similar in that the symbol used for the phoneme is not that of any allophone, it differs in that it not as confusing as the use of ɽ. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 13:00, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

I've spent some time going through the literature on this thing, and--well--I'm confused. Labrune (2012) says that "the prototypic realization of the only Japanese liquid /r/ is ... the apico-alveolar flap ... [the apico-alveolar flap] should be considered the neutral relization of the rhotic (sic?) in the language because its articulation is central compared to other variants", but doesn't otherwise justify his choice for the flap. Okada (1991) says that it's post-alveolar in place but is not explicit about the manner of articulation. He goes on to say that: "Initially it tends to be slightly affricated [ḏ^ɹ̝]. Between vowels [ɾ] may be more frequent. A postalveolar [l̠] is not unusual in all positions." He transcribes [l̠] with an underlying track for post-alveolar (retracted), but not for [ɾ]. Is he suggesting that the tap is alveolar? --Lfdder (talk) 13:39, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

Okada also says that ɾ is the more common symbol used to transcribe the sound. Have you looked at any of the sources cited at Japanese speakers learning r and l? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 15:04, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

Actually, he says that "r" is more common, not "ɾ". I've not looked at any of those, but most seem irrelevant. --Lfdder (talk) 15:17, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

When you say that he says that "r" is more common, you mean to represent the phoneme and/or generally in transcription of Japanese in the Roman letters, rather than the issue of phones, I assume?--ZarlanTheGreen (talk) 08:58, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, to represent the phoneme. --Lfdder (talk) 10:00, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

P.S. Having now gone through the edits to the article, I'd just like to applaud the great efforts of improving it. You guys are doing fine work. D.S.--ZarlanTheGreen (talk) 09:45, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

It's gone almost twenty days now, without any further change or discussion, concerning the rhotic phoneme, despite an acknowledgement by all, that there is an issue here... Well, I guess I might as well change it to /r/. If nothing else, it's certainly better than using ɽ ...as has been pretty well established here, I'd say.--ZarlanTheGreen (talk) 11:59, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

Arbitrary break

@Zarlan, things seem a bit muddled. You asked:

I take it from that, that you are saying that the rhotic phoneme is [ɾ] and [ɺ], but not [ɽ]?

You ask about phonemes, but then confuse the phonemes and phones in your question. Just to be sure we're all on the same page (and maybe this might wind up answering your question in the process):

• Phonemes are transcribed /in slashes/, and can be symbols representing phones that don't actually appear in the language. One phoneme may correspond to multiple phones.
• Phones are transcribed [in square brackets], and should only use symbols representing the actual phones (sounds) used in the language.

The article uses the phoneme /ɽ/, which is not a phone in Japanese. The article also uses [ɾ] and [ɺ], which are the phones corresponding to the /ɽ/ phoneme.

HTH, -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 15:46, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

I think Zarlan gets that. It seems like we may want to use a different symbol for the rhotic phoneme. The best options are /ɾ/, /ɺ/, and /r/. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 17:04, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

I am aware of that, and actually complied with that distinction. I was asking about what phones that the rhotic phoneme was composed of. Essentially, when I said "the rhotic phoneme is [ɾ] and [ɺ], but not [ɽ]?", I meant "the rhotic phoneme is composed of the phones [ɾ] and [ɺ], but not [ɽ]?". I hope that clears that up.

Also, the question has already been answered.--ZarlanTheGreen (talk) 21:54, 5 April 2013 (UTC)