Hot answers tagged pronunciation
18
Short answer: The allowed pronunciations depends somewhat on the word origin.
For Sino-Japanese words (漢語), such as 英語<えいご> or 先生<せんせい>, the underlying vowel sequence is always ええ, but can be pronounced as either えい or ええ (despite its native orthography being <えい>).
Most Yamato (和語) words are the same as the Sino-Japanese words, but in some cases ...
17
“アェ” is not a valid spelling of any sound in the standard usage of kana letters. If it is used to describe any sound (in a nonstandard way), I agree with AHelps that it probably describes “æ” sound.
However, according to web search, アェウクス is a password which appears in a video game “時空の覇者 Sa・Ga3.” As it is a video game, the password used in it does not ...
14
It comes from the Greek word xylon, which means wood. The Greek word xylon is pronounced "ksilon", so the Japanese transcription is faithful to the original Greek pronunciation, rather than the English corruption of the word.
See the answer to this question for the reason why "x" is pronounced "z" at the beginning of English words.
As for the origin of ...
13
Why is it pronounced "yen"?
I was actually wondering this a month or so ago, but found the answer on the Wikipedia article for yen/en.
The spelling and pronunciation "yen" is standard in English. This is because mainly English speakers who visited Japan at the end of the Edo period to the early Meiji period spelled words this way. ... In the 16th ...
12
Dono has a point in his comment where he mentions that even if there were a way to transcribe it, the sound [wu] does not exist in Japanese.
Let me first explain why it doesn't exist.
The Japanese phoneme /w/ as in /wa/,/wi/,/we/ and /wo/ (transcribed as ワ,ウィ,ウェ and ウォ) is not the same as the phoneme /w/ in English. /w/ in Japanese is the approximant ...
11
If you ask a Japanese person to say a word like renraku fast, and then gradually ask them to say it more and more slowly, you will notice that what initially sounded like an r becomes an l as they slow down (usually earlier on for women). So the claim that l and r don't exist is simply wrong -- they both do, but as variants (allophones) of the same sound ...
10
父 and 乳 cannot be differentiated by pronunciation (including accentation).
While the word titi "father" is attested in Old Japanese (8th century), titi "breasts" is not extant until the 17th century. However, it is more complicated than that. titi "breasts" is a reduplication of ti "breasts" which is extant in OJ. Also, titi "father" seems to be a ...
8
Xyl~ is the same as Xyl in Xylophone (coming from 'wood' in Greek). How it is pronounced varies between languages. You can see this by the explanation on the Japanese wiki article for Xylophone, which shows the different pronunciations in katakana:
Japanese: シロフォン
English: ザイロフォウン
German: クシュロフォーン
French: グジロフォヌ
Italian: クシロフォノ、シロフォノ
In German the IPA ...
8
(Figured I should write more than two words for an answer).
What you are hearing is probably 平気{へいき}. I'd say it's more 'okay' as in calm, collected, emotionally unaffected by something than in the physical sense.
平気なふりをする
Pretend to be okay. (put on a brave face, stiff upper lip, etc)
It is sometimes used in a negative sense to refer to having no ...
8
(Warning: I do not know phonetics in general, and I do not speak Mandarin. I am writing this answer while consulting Wikipedia. Although I am trying my best to write an accurate answer, you should take it with a grain of salt, especially with my use of technical terms and with statements about Mandarin.)
My question is, are the two sh's completely ...
7
Due to a policy called mutualism (treat back the way you are treated), Chinese names are written in the corresponding Japanese kanji, and are pronounced with the most typical Japanese on-reading. Korean names are written in katakana that describes an approximation of the Korean pronounciation. There are some exceptions for readings that have been established ...
6
I hate to bring anime into this reply but all Japanese people I have met know the pronunciation "zetto", and all of them have heard of Dragon Ball Z. Which in Japanese is "Doragon Bo-ru Zetto". I work in a Junior High School in Japan and whenever students don't understand "zee" if I say "zetto" or even "zeddo" they understand immediately what letter I mean - ...
6
ゼット is the most common pronunciation for Z.
ズィー is used by younger generation or by realists, but elderly and conservative people may not understand it.
ゼッド is rare. Actually, I have never heard of it.
Traditionally, there are several English alphabet letters that are pronounced departing from mere transcription of the sound. They are
デー (DEe, HL) for ...
6
While it seems clear that the Japanese have a different sense of this
sound
What you're actually referring too is called the phoneme; a discrete contrastive unit of sound of a language. In IPA transcription, "W"=[ɰ], and "M"=[m], where the bracket notation indicates phonetic transcription. These two are indeed part of the phonemic inventory of ...
6
In cases 1 and 2, you have two vowels in succession: /ie/ and /io/.
Assuming that
Your articulatory organs cannot jump from one discrete state to another.
You do not generally stop/weaken your breath between words/morae (of course once in a while you have to stop to breathe in)
you will hear the mouth/tongue moving from i->e and i->o, which is what ...
5
This is purely anecdotal and based on my own experience and confusion with this, but ううん has generally been a negative interjection, as in definition 1, and うーん has a meaning in English like "mmmm" or "ummm" or "hmmm" or something like that, conveying reluctance. I figured this out after some confusing situations wherein I would suggest going somewhere or ...
5
There are some significant differences between Kansai-ben and what you see in textbooks, I'm not sure where you would get the idea that the only difference was in pitch emphasis. There are some very significant pitch-differences, but that's not the only change. (Personally, I felt the pitch changes were much easier to notice in Kyoto, but that might have ...
5
The せい of 先生 is a good example of 長音{ちょうおん} (a long vowel). While it is written as せい , in reality it is pronounced as セー with a エー sound (not a エイ sound).
Other examples include:
Kanji hiragana prononciation
----- -------- -------------
映画 えいが エーガ
英語 えいご エーゴ
時計 とけい トケー
丁寧 ていねい テーネー
Another example of a 長音 that is ...
5
There is no semantic difference. The pronunciation varies with local dialects, and with the level of politeness.
As for politeness, [sei] is a pronunciation sometimes used by people to emphasise formality (e.g. in conjunction with 敬語), but this is nowhere near a necessity. I would say that [see] is the common pronunciation. Try sticking in an almost silent ...
5
Here's the English equivalents for the IPA:
[ɡ] = the 'g' in 'get'
[ŋ] = the 'ng' in 'sing'
The main difference is that [ŋ] is a nasal consonant, whereas [ɡ] is not. If you try plugging your nose and pronouncing [ŋ], you'll realize that it's not possible. That's because air must flow through the nasal passage, but not the oral passage, for [ŋ]. The ...
5
This answer won't be very helpful if you're looking for a general rule that is followed.
There was a Chinese girl in my Japanese class, and she asked the teacher how she should write and pronounce her name. However, the teacher replied with something that seems plainly obvious now that I know of it. The teacher told her that it's her name so it's her ...
5
According to "Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: Japanese" by Hideo Okada, /ɽ/ is pronounced
postalveolar in place rather than retroflex[...]. Initially and after /ɴ/, it is typically an affricate with short friction, .
In a more Unicode-friendly notation, this could be transcribed as [ɖɻ̝̆] (where again, these aren't really retroflex ...
5
Wikipedia seems to say it is alveolar lateral flap, as opposed to the otherwise alveolar (central) flap. If you are serious, maybe you might want to try the article cited there. Trying this with myself, I seem to get the difference. I seem to be able to freely alternate an initial alveolar lateral flap with a centered one, but not a non-initial alveolar flap ...
5
I am not familiar with the manga, but this is a fairly common way of expressing words that have a double meaning. For example, judging solely based on the one sentence you posted, I would guess that the speaker's father has some unusual job, like maybe he's an assassin or something like that. What the speaker would be actually saying would be 親父のことを知ってる, but ...
5
I guess we can put it to a vote.
Technically, じっぷん seems to be the correct choice. Posts on this page say that in a 漢和辞典 じっ is listed as a reading of 十, but じゅっ isn't. Moreover, the page claims that about half of the TV announcers (for baseball) do take care to pronounce it じっ.
I don't have a TV, so I don't have an opinion on that, but in daily life, I ...
5
I believe よなも is 世な面, meaning roughly "the surface of the world". Here's how it breaks down:
よ is 世 (world)
な is the archaic case particle な, which is the same as the modern particle の
も is 面 (surface), a word derived from おも (the お is elided)
The case particle な is rare in modern Japanese. It's preserved in several words:
眼（まなこ＝[目]{ま}な[子]{こ}, ...
5
I think the difference between the is really captured by their appearance alone. As you mentioned, ～ sometimes has a sort of wavy 'tremolo' type feel to it, or at least that's the image evoked by looking at it. I'm not sure how many times you would actually fluctuate the pitch like that in an actual reading, though. I usually associate it with a kind of ...
5
We sometimes write 「な!?」,「なっ!?」or「なっ・・・!?」(These three will be pronounced the same way) to mean 「なにっ！？」or「何！？」. Probably it's like "Wha...!?" or "What the...!?".
We also sometimes write 「え゛っ！」in place of「えっ！」 to add emphasis, but the 「゛」([濁点]{だくてん}) won't change/affect the pronunciation, so it'd be impossible to pronounce 「な゛」or「え゛」 correctly (I don't know ...
4
As Chocolate answered correctly, "equal" is usually omitted, but if you want to say it, it would be である, or なり (natural in this context but archaic). The one with イコール that Chocolate mentions is often heard, but I do not think it is a grammatical Japanese sentence. It is tracing the mathematical notation token by token.
4
As you have already picked up on, the intonation (change in pitch) of words is vastly different.
A common example is the pronunciation of the word 日本.
Osaka:
Starts high, and pitch lowers
-- _ _
に ほ ん
Standard:
Starts low, and pitch raises and then lowers
_ - _
に ほ ん
However this is ...
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