Re: Phoneme winnowing continues

On Tue, Jun 03, 2003 at 01:08:19AM -0500, Nik Taylor wrote:
> Like kana.
Yeah, I mentioned kana in my original message.  There aren't unique
glyphs for each syllable, but even so, Japanese's syllable inventory
is quite a bit smaller than Okaikiar's.

> There is a diacritic for voicing, turning, e.g., ka -> ga,
There's also a diacritic that turns e.g. fa -> pa, but IIRC it's not a
general fricative->stop converter (e.g. you can't use it to turn su into
tu).

> Also, long vowels are written with vowel characters (kaa = ka + a)
In Hiragana that's true.  Katakana usually uses a generic "make the
last vowel long" marker.  But aren't long vowels really considered
to be two syllables anyway?  I mean, "kaa" is really just "ka"
followed by "a", not a separate syllable that would add to the
inventory.

> and gemination and the moraic
> nasal, the two legal codas, are written with their own characters (well,
> little tsu for gemination, and a unique character for the nasal)
But again, the nasal is phonemically - and sometimes phonetically
- a separate syllable.   For instance, in the first stanza of the
theme song to "Uchyuu Senkan Yamato", the name of the ship is sung
with each syllable on its own beat, including the 'N's:  u-chyu-u
se-n-ka-n ya-ma-to [utSjuusEn=kAn=jamato].  The final N in
"senkan" is held for a good bit, too.

-Mark

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