Tag Info

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 ...

This is the result of a well known devoicing rule in Japanese. Devoicing means that there is no vibration of the vocal folds. For example, the difference between [s] and [z] is only that [z] is voiced. The IPA diatric for devoiced phones is a circle at the bottom of the glpyh eg [z̥]=[s]. Although there is still much dialectual, idiolectual (the way a ...

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 ...

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 ...

I've got an old PDF folder full of papers on Japanese, and I managed to pull up two which might be helpful. (I've been on the search for a full detailed phonetic study of Japanese. Add a comment if you know of some other technical resources!). The first, the open paper Processing missing vowels: Allophonic processing in Japanese (Ogasawara and Warner, 2009) ...

The fact is, 先生 is not regularly written in katakana in the first place, so there is no authentic guideline that tells you which is correct. If you are going to write it in katakana, there must be an unusual purpose for doing it. If that purpose is to indicate that you just don't/can't use kanji, then センセイ would be appropriate. If the purpose is that you ...

I have not particularly noticed this [ɛ] or [ɔ:]. So I cannot comment on them. What is the history of these vowel variants (if any)? Are they by any chance remnants from historical phonemic mergers, or are they just one-off phenomena? In Middle Japanese, there were both [ɔː] and [oː]. The former derive from /au/ or /eu/ (-->Note), while the latter from ...