Re: USAGE: More Japanese

On Sat, 5 Jul 2003 16:39:49 -0400, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:

>One last plea for Nihongo help, then I'll return to conlanging
>topics.
Well, compared to some other threads, Mark, this is relatively on-topic!
What little Japanese I remember is somewhat old-fashioned, but I'll try to
answer.

>I'm trying to transcribe a couple Japanese songs.  Let me say
>that I definitely hear /4/ as [l] in some contexts, especially
>phrase-initial.  But there are other places where I'm not hearing
>what I should be hearing, so I have some questions.
>
>1. It appears that [N] is an allophone of /g/.  Correct?
Yes. It is (or was) limited to certain speakers, and mostly non-initial /g/
IIRC.

>   That's reasonable enough, but for some reason one of the [N]s sounds
>   like [nj] to me, which is of course a different phoneme altogether.
Is there an [i] or [j] after it?

>2. Does Japanese have [?] a an allophone of /t/?
No. The end of a word in isolation, or the start of a word can sound like
[?] due to crisp enunciation, but that's all I know of.

>   Or is it more likely to be just a case of "all stops sound alike in a
>   recording"?
>
>3. At one point an intervocalic /m/ seems to disappear completely.  There's
>   just no trace of it; the word "omotte" /omot:e/ sounds like [o:?e].
>   Any idea what happened there?
I've heard of [Mmi] becoming [M.i], but this is lexically limited IIRC.

>4. The converse keeps happening, too; I keep hearing extra sounds that
>   aren't supposed to be there.  At various points in the two songs I
>   have, I hear "iru" /i4M/ as [i4mM]; "kotare" /kotAre/ as [kotArje];
>   and "ki" /ki/ as [kwi].  Except for the [rje], which sounds like a
>   palatized syllable, the extra sounds obviously don't fit the
>   Japanese syllable rules, so they aren't a problem, but it seems odd
>   that they're there.
Weird! I don't think [kw] or [rj] or [4m] can occur in Japanese either.
What kind of recording is this? Is the singer native Japanese? Also, I
might as well ask how you know what's supposed to be there. Could [kwi]
really be [kMi] and [rje] really [rie]? Or is it some obscure Ryukyuan
dialect?

>Finally, I would like to make sure I understand all the phonetic changes.
>These are the ones I know about; am I missing any?
>
>1. /hu/ is pronounced [fu]
>2. /si/ is pronounced [Si] (/sj/ is [S])
>3. /ti/ is pronounced [tSi (/tj/ is [tS])
>4. /tu/ is pronounced [tsu]
>5. /zi/ is pronounced [dZi] (/zj/ is [dZ])
Close. [f] should be bilabial. The others are close enough, I think.

Jeff

>Thanks again.
>
>-Mark

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