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How did “little tsu” become a lengthener?

On Wikipedia and elsewhere, Japan is written like so: Nippon ( にっぽん ).

What is that tsu doing in there? Why isn't it represented in the romaji rendering of the name?

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This time, the question is well written, and makes sense as a question, but is too basic. It is something that you should learn in the first few pages of a textbook about Japanese. There is nothing tricky or exceptional in your question. Your approach of tyring to use this website for learning Japanese entirely from the beginning is essentially wrong. – sawa Jul 24 '12 at 7:06
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I meant your approach of trying to use this website as a substitute for a textbook is wrong. – sawa Jul 24 '12 at 7:14
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Pro tip: Next time share the research that you've already done to try and answer your question. This is one of the points SE sites try to encourage. – Chris Jul 24 '12 at 7:15
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@Chris: +1 for using "Pro Tip"! :) – istrasci Jul 24 '12 at 14:18
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@Chris I did not know what to call the little tsu, so I did not know how to search for it. – Aerovistae Jul 24 '12 at 18:22
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marked as duplicate by sawa, Flaw, Chris, jogloran, Dave♦ Jul 28 '12 at 1:50

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2 Answers

up vote 6 down vote

On Wikipedia and elsewhere, Japan is written like so: Nippon ( にっぽん ). What is that tsu doing in there?

The chiisai-tsu (small tsu) should be covered by any basic hiragana book, a good alternative is wikipedia's hiragana article. From the writing section:

A small tsu っ, called a sokuon, indicates that the following consonant is geminated (doubled). For example, compare さか saka "hill" with さっか sakka "author". It also sometimes appears at the end of utterances, where it denotes a glottal stop, as in いてっ! ([iteʔ] Ouch!). However, it cannot be used to double the na, ni, nu, ne, no syllables' consonants – to double them, the singular n (ん) is added in front of the syllable.

"Doubled consonant" is probably not the most straightforward way to describe it, but in general you can think of a sokuon introducing a slight pause before continuing with the next kana sound.

Why isn't it represented in the romaji rendering of the name?

It actually is, that's what the doubled 'pp' represents in that particular romaji system. The various romaji systems are often contradictory with each other, but most of them use this doubling-consonant system to represent a っ.

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up vote 8 down vote

The つ character you're talking about is commonly referred to as "little つ" and looks like っ. This characters is not actually pronounced, but rather it means to take a small pause.

In the case of にっぽん, instead of pronouncing it as "nitsupon", you would be pronouncing it like "ni [small pause] pon" which is romanised as "nippon" which has a natural pause between the two 'p's.

But like sawa said in a comment, this is a very basic thing in Japanese and you would have learnt this from a textbook's first chapter.

For a more complete explanation though, you can visit the wikipedia page on it.

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Small quibbling (and really, we shouldn't have to be explaining the pronunciation of basic kana here), but "ni [small pause] pon" would rather be "にーぽん"... a slightly closer description would be "nip [small pause] pon". – Dave♦ Jul 24 '12 at 8:18
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@Dave: Long quibbling: :) I think that you are right in that the end of the syllable に in word にっぽん is slightly different from the end of the syllable に in e.g. the sentence-end case. But because the most prominent audible part of consonant [p] is the burst of airflow, 小太郎’s notation “ni [small pause] pon” is quite an accurate description of the actual sound. On the other hand, your notation “nip [small pause] pon” reflects better how a speaker makes this sound. The process of producing the [p] sound starts before the pause: you block the airflow by your lips before the pause. – Tsuyoshi Ito Jul 24 '12 at 11:51
@Dave: that's a good way of putting it. When teaching beginning Japanese students how to pronounce a small っ, I tell them to just pronounce the romaji letter twice. – istrasci Jul 26 '12 at 15:01

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