Re: Japanese phonemes (was Re: The Monovocalic PIE Myth (wasGermans have no /w/, ...))

Danny Wier wrote:
>
> From: "Nik Taylor" <yonjuuni@...>
>
> > The reason is that there's no voiced /h/, and voiced /h/ is very rare
> > anyways.  "f" simply DOES NOT EXIST in Japanese on a PHONEMIC level.
>
> It doesn't really exist on a phonetic level either; it's actually [P] (IPA
> phi), which makes me think more of the sound of [W] than [f].
Really?  Sounds very /f/-like to me.  Of course, my dialect doesn't have
[W], perhaps if mine did, I'd think of "wh" as being closer than "f",
but for [W]-less dialects, I think /f/ is the closest English sound to
it.

> The Hiragana and Katakana syllabries actually do have characters for /we/,
> /wi/, and /wo/ (but still no /je/). I think they're only used for foreign
> words (that aren't Sino-Japanese).
*Very* early forms of the man'yougana, the phonetically-used kanji that
developed into hiragana, had a distinct /je/ character-set.  But, that
died out long before anything you can call "early hiragana" developed.
And anyways, as Christophe pointed out, they're not used in borrowings
at all.  /we/ and /wi/ in both kana, and /wo/ in katakana are completely
obsolete since 1946 (and were homophonous with /i/ /e/ /o/).

Personally, I tend to think of the /wo/ hiragana as being almost more
like a kanji than a kana in the modern orthography, since it's not
really phonetic per se anymore (used only in the one particle).  :-)

Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> No they're not. Foreign [we] and [wi] sequences are usually borrowed as
> [M.e] and [M.i], i.e. they become bisyllabic (I don't have any example
> right now, but I do remember seeing such borrowings).
Originally, but nowadays they're often made monosyllabic, written as U
followed by a *little* kana, i.e., "whiskey" can be written as "uisukii"
or "u(i)sukii", using parentheses to indicate a small i, u(i) being
pronounced as [wi]

Reply