Re: Futurese

>I count
>
>k g s sh z j t ch d n h b p m y r w = 17.
You can't count s and sh as separate consonants, since they
never oppose because they're allophones. And the same with
t/ch, z/j, h/f. In Nippon-shiki romanized orthography the
phonemes are consistently represented by one single letter,
so "shi" is written as "si", "chi" as "ti" and so on.

>If you count palatalised
>consonants ("youon") separately (and not as cons + y), add ky gy ny hy
>by py my ry for a total of 25.
They're not separate consonants, but just a consonant
followed by one of the diphthongs "ya", "yo" and "yu".


>If you want to get to 27, maybe you need
>to include ts and <null>.
And you can count also the slightest allophonic
variations as different sounds and arrive at an
astronomical number of consonants for Japanese.


>One could also consider counting "dz" and "dj" as separate from "z" and
>"j", though they're pronounced identically nowadays AFAIK.
"dz" certainly is different from "z". "dj" and "j" are
allophones.


>Then there are also doubled consonants ("sokuon"), though they could be
>considered simply as cons + cons.
More exactly, they're glottal stop + consonant


> So happyaku "800" could be either h-a-
>p-p-y-a-k-u or h-a-ppy-a-k-u or something in between.
I would rather say it is h-a-'-p-ya-k-u

Cheers,
Javier

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