Talk:Japanese phonology

Moras or Morae

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

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

Recent additions: queries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for the reply. 😊

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

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

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

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

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

Satooya

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

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