| ▲ | juancn 6 days ago |
| The ō in Hepburn could correspond to おう or おお or オー. That's an ambiguity.
What's the issue here? They all sound exactly the same, although おお seems unusual. The choice of kana kinda depends on the what you're writing. |
|
| ▲ | retrac 5 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| In the phonetic alphabet it's /e:/ vs. /ei/ and /o:/ vs. /ou/. If you're an English speaker, you can be forgiven for a very stereotypical trait of the English accent. English speakers have a real hard time with the /e/ or /e:/ sounds as well as the /o/ and /o:/ sounds. Most English dialects don't have either a monophthong /e/ or /o/. Both the long and short tend to get heard as /eɪ/ and /oʊ/. French enchanté /ɑ̃ ʃɑ̃ te/ is heard and borrowed as /ɑn.ʃɑn.teɪ/. German gehen /ge:n/ is heard as "gain" /geɪn/. And Japanese /o:/ and /ou/ both get heard as /oʊ/. It's arguably a minimal pair in Japanese: 負う /ou/ (to carry), 王 /o:/ (king). |
| |
| ▲ | Anon1096 5 days ago | parent [-] | | 負う and 王 are both hepburn-romanized as ou though. 方 and 頬 (hou vs hoo) is a better example. I don't really think native speakers still distinguish these. Feel free to try listening yourself though: 頬, note that it has multiple pronunciations but we only care about hoo: https://forvo.com/word/%E9%A0%AC/#ja 方 https://forvo.com/word/%E6%96%B9%E3%80%80%EF%BC%88%E3%81%BB%... In some cases though there is still a clear difference in pronunciation for most speakers, ex 塔 vs 遠 | | |
| ▲ | uasi 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > 方 and 頬 (hou vs hoo) is a better example. As a native Japanese speaker, this example is eye-opening. I hadn't even realized that the u in 方 is pronounced as /o:/ — I believe most Japanese people haven't either, despite unknowingly pronounce it that way. Also, I have no idea how to Hepburn-romanize 方 vs 頬, 負う vs 王, and 塔 vs 遠. If I had to romanize, I would just write it as whatever the romaji input method understands correctly (hou/hoo, ou/ou, and tou/too, in this case). | | |
| ▲ | kazinator 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Your comment is astonishing. If you know the word 方, that it is /ho:/, and you know that it has a う in it when written out, how can you not know that う stands for making the o long? The only vowel is the long o. Japanese kindergarten kids can recognize hiragana words with "おう", correctly identifying it as /o:/. By the time they learn the 方 kanji they would have seen it written in hiragana upmpteen times, like AよりBのほうがいい and whatnot. | | |
| ▲ | uasi 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Well, speaking for myself, I internalized how う is pronounced differently in different contexts when I was young, and by now I've almost forgotten there's a difference I need to be conscious of. When I hear /ho:/ in a certain context, "ほう(方)" immediately comes to mind, without noticing that what I heard was a long o. To me it's just the う sound. And if someone pointed to their face while saying /ho:/, I'd think it's the お sound as in "ほお(頬)". | |
| ▲ | raincole 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Because they're a native speaker. Native speakers are often utterly oblivious to the 'rules' of their own languages. Every time I read a rule about my mother tongue (Mandarin) online I was like, lol what nonsense foreigners made up... And then I realize that rule does exist. I just have internalized it for so long. | | |
| ▲ | pitkali 5 days ago | parent [-] | | A typical example for English is the adjective order. | | |
| ▲ | naniwaduni 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Adjective order in English is basically that most essential qualities of the object go closest to the head. There are lists out there that try to break this down into categories of adjective ("opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose"), and to some extent the anglo intuitions on which sorts of properties are more or less essential are not trivial, but it's not as arbitrary as people want to make it out to be. | | |
| ▲ | 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | SilasX 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | This. People act like it's a hyper-complicated rule that English speakers magically infer, when in reality, a) other languages do it, and b) it's a much simpler rule (that you've given) which someone overcomplicated. As a counterexample (in line with your explanation), consider someone snarking on the WallStreetBets forum: "Come on, guys, this is supposed to be Wall Street bets, not Wall Street prudent hedges!" Adjective order changes because the intended significance changes. (Normally it would be "prudent Wall Street hedges".) Side note: please don't nitpick about whether "Wall Street" is functionally an adjective here. The same thing would happen if the forum had been named "FinancialBets". | | |
| ▲ | kazinator 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | People "overcomplicate" the rule because they find counterexamples to the simple rule. It's a fool's errand because the way human language works is that people happily accept odd exceptions by rote memory. So the rule simply says that there exist these exceptions. Also, there is something called euphony: speakers find utterances questionable if they are not in some canonical form they are used to hearing. For instance "black & white" is preferred over "white & black". The rules boil down to "what people are used to hearing, regardless of the underlying grammar offering other possibilities". | |
| ▲ | Cpoll 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Isn't this a bad example? There's only one adjective in "prudent hedges." Changing which noun "prudent" acts on isn't a matter of adjective order. (I suppose Wall Street is a proper adjective, like "New York pizza," but you said no nitpicking) | | |
| ▲ | kazinator 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | In compound noun phrases, nouns serve as adjective-like modifiers. By the way, modifying compounds generally must not be plurals, to the extent that even pluralia tantum words like scissors and pants get forced into a pseudo-singular form in order to serve as modifiers, giving us scissor lift and pant leg, which must not be scissors lift and pants leg. An example of a noun phrase containing many modifying nouns is something like: law school entrance examination grading procedure workflow. The order among modifying nouns is semantically critical and different from euphonic adjective order; examples in which modifying nouns are permuted, resulting in strange or nonsensical interpretations, or bad grammar, are not valid for demonstrating constraintsa mong the order of true adjectives which independently apply to their subject. For instance, red, big house is strange and wants to be big, red house. The house is independently big and red. This is not related to why entrance examination grading procedure cannot be changed to examination entrance grading procedure. The modifiers do not target the head, but each other. "entrance" applies to "examination", not to "procedure" or "grading". | |
| ▲ | SilasX 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Did you read the second sentence of that paragraph? The same thing would happen with a legit adjective, like if the forum had been named "FinancialBets": "Guys, this is financial bets, not financial prudent hedges." |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| ▲ | BalinKing 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Could you elaborate on the last sentence? Wiktionary claims they're pronounced the same modulo pitch accent, but Wiktionary's phonetic transcriptions are (mostly?) auto-generated AFAIK. | | |
| ▲ | uasi 5 days ago | parent [-] | | 塔 can be pronounced as tou, too, or somewhere between the two. It depends on the speaker, speaking style, and possibly dialect. Either way, Japanese speakers rely more on context and pitch accent than actual pronunciation, so it communicates fine. | | |
| ▲ | kazinator 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > 塔 can be pronounced as tou No it can't, unless someone is spelling it out, or singing it in a song where it is given two notes, or just hyper-correcting their speech based on their knowledge of writing. Annoyed speech and such can break words into their morae for empahsis, which breaks up dipthongs. E.g. angry Japanese five-year-old: ga kkō ni i ki ta ku nā i!!! (I don't wanna go to school!!!) "nā i" is not the regular way of saying "nai". The idea that "nai" has that as an alternative pronunciation is a strawman. | | |
| ▲ | uasi 5 days ago | parent [-] | | You're right. I looked up 現代仮名遣いの告示 [0] for the first time, and it says 塔（とう） is officially pronounced as "too". I had it backwards - I thought that 塔 is "tou", but due to the varying sounds of う, people could (and often preferred to) pronounce it as "too" in everyday speech. This kind of misconception seems not uncommon. There's an FAQ on NHK's website [1] that addresses the question of whether 言う（いう） is pronounced "iu" or "yuu". The answer is "yuu", and the article make it clear that: "It's not that [iu] is used for polite/careful speech and [yuu] for casual speech - there is no such distinction." I think native speakers learn words by hearing them and seeing them written in hiragana, before learning the underlying rules, so they know "too" is written as とう, but might not realize that とう shouldn't be pronounced as "tou" or いう as "iu". These are at least less obvious than cases like は in こんにちは never being "ha". Personally, if I heard someone say 塔 as "tou" or 言う as "iu", I probably wouldn't count it as incorrect, nor would I even notice the phonetic difference. [0] https://www.bunka.go.jp/kokugo_nihongo/sisaku/joho/joho/kiju... [1] https://www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/research/kotoba/20160801_2.html | | |
| ▲ | BalinKing 2 days ago | parent [-] | | FWIW I think 言う is a different phenomenon entirely, because おう is pronounced as two vowels when it has grammatical meaning (in this case, as the verb ending), or between different words/morphemes. But my (non-native) understanding was that for nouns and such, or within the main morpheme of a verb (e.g. 葬る), “ou” is (usually) indistinguishable from “oo”. |
|
| |
| ▲ | Lightkey 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > as tou, too, or somewhere between the two. I see what you did there. |
|
| |
| ▲ | decimalenough 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 負う and 王 are both hepburn-romanized as ou though No, it's ou vs ō. | | |
| ▲ | _0ffh 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Oh, I thought the added u and the bar were just two different ways to indicated that the o is stretched (the u looking like a workaround to avoid special characters). |
| |
| ▲ | kazinator 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Nope! Writing 王 as "ou" is "wāpuro rōmaji" or modified Hepburn. Proper Hepburn wants ō. Which cannot be used for 負う. |
|
|
|
| ▲ | makeitdouble 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The main issues probably arise on official documents and stuff with financial impact. Like how many people end up with the same romanized name while being distinct in other alphabets. Then discrepancies between the different systems because they usually are sloppy on the handling of these matters. Now that most stuff is electronic, these small differences can have wider effects and be a PITA to fix. |
| |
| ▲ | throwaway2037 5 days ago | parent [-] | | > The main issues probably arise on official documents and stuff with financial impact.
Do you have evidence of this? Else, I doubt it. Most official documents will also require your residence address. If you are signing any official documents, they will check your zairyu or My Number card for both photographic similarity, romaji (roman character) spelling of your name, and residence address. All of these in combination can easily uniquely identify a foreign resident in Japan. | | |
| ▲ | makeitdouble 5 days ago | parent [-] | | You're looking at the checks done by a human. And I'd argue those are already problematic enough, yes I've heard of first hand stories of people stuck at the airport explaining that the spelling on they passport and their reservation name being different. People pay attention on international flights now, but still fall for the other traps. I remember a guy buying concert tickets with the most common spelling and getting stuck at the gate as they had nothing on them matching it. The worst part is the automated checks, and sure it's a huge PITA. I've spent 1h30 last weekend at a docomo shop to have my name recognized by their system, with the guy looking at the papers and not understanding why it wouldn't do it. That's with near perfect matching between the documents. Imagine having spellings mismatched. Banks also have a different matching system (Katakana based, with a string length limit, for account matching, and another WTF system for card owner matching), which is screwed in its very own way. That's one of the main reasons for the debacle with the MyNumber Card bank account matching last year. > uniquely identify a foreign resident Uniquely being identified is the easy part. Being _properly_ identified is something else altogether. |
|
|
|
| ▲ | timr 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| They’re not the same. おう is discernible from おお, and the difference can be important. That said, this is far from the most important problem in Japanese pronunciation for westerners, and at speed the distinction between them can become very subtle. |
| |
| ▲ | kazinator 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Yes, for instance こうり （小売）is completely different from こおり （氷）. If you're trying to say that when those two denote /o:/ it is a different /o:/, you are laughably wrong. It is not reliably discernible as a statistical fact you can gather from a population sample of native speakers over many words, if they are asked to speak normally (not using spelling as emphasis, or using the words in a song). | | |
| ▲ | timr 5 days ago | parent [-] | | > If you're trying to say that when those two denote /o:/ it is a different /o:/, you are laughably wrong. There's literally a different sound, which is why the difference in kana exists. Disagree if you like -- as I said, it's subtle -- but I don't know why you feel the need to be insulting about it. Writing an inaccurate non-kana symbol for the two sounds is no more an argument than saying that the sounds are identical because they share a common romanization. There are some words where you can more clearly hear the difference than others. Consider, for example, the pronunciation of 紅茶, vs your example of 氷. It's not wrong to pronounce the former as a long o, but you can hear the difference when natives say it. Similarly, こういう is not said as こおいう, and 公園 is not こおえん. | | |
| ▲ | kazinator 5 days ago | parent [-] | | The difference in kana was not recently selected in order to represent a feature of the contemporary language. It is historic!!! | | |
| ▲ | z500 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I think the confusion here is in the placement of the vowels. おお and おう do sound identical when pronounced as a single unit, but the おう in 小売 (こ.うり) isn't a single unit, it's just a お that happens to be next to a う | | |
| ▲ | timr 4 days ago | parent [-] | | This might be true. I’ve never thought about it deeply enough! |
|
|
|
| |
| ▲ | jhanschoo 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Do you have an academic source that describes this difference in pronunciation in native speakers in normal usage? | | | |
| ▲ | rokob 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I’m new to the language and thought these would be the same. But I just listened to some words with the two and the おお definitely has like a bigger o sound. That’s quite subtle. | | |
| ▲ | timr 5 days ago | parent [-] | | You’ll hear it more easily with time. It’s hard to completely separate stuff like this from context (i.e. it’s far more rare to have a collision in sound that makes sense if you know the rest of the sentence), but it does matter for discriminating between words when you’re trying to look words up, for example. | | |
| ▲ | kazinator 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I've never heard of the /o:/ of おう and おお being different. I've never seen a small child, or foreign speaker, being corrected in this matter; i.e that they are using the wrong /o:/ for the word and should make it sound like this instead. This is literally not a thing that exists outside of some foreigners' imaginations. You will sooner hear a difference from $1000 speaker cables before you hear this, and it will only be if you are the one who paid. You may be letting by pitch accent deceive you. In words that contain /o:/ it's possible for that to be a pitch boundary so that pitch rises during the /o:/ and that can contrast against another /o:/ word where that doesn't happen. The 頬 word in Japanese is "kinda funny" in that it has a ほお variant and a ほほ variant. It has always stood out in my mind as peculiar. I'd swear I've heard an in-between "ほ・お" that sound somewhat reminiscent of "uh oh", with a bit of a volume dip or little stop that makes it sound like two /o/ vowels. It could be that the speaker intends ほほ, but the second /h/ sound is not articulated clearly. It may even be that the ほほ spelling was invented to try to represent this situation (which is a wild guess, based on zero research). In any case, the situation with that cheeky little word doesn't establish anything general about おお/こお/そお/とお... I've been fooled by my imagination. For instance, many years ago I thought I would swear that I heard the object marker を sound like "WO" in some songs; i.e. exactly how it typed in romaji-based input methods, because it belongs to the わ group. Like "kimi-o" sounding like "kimi-wo". Today I'm convinced it is just a kind of 空耳 (soramimi). Or the artifact of /i/ followed by /o/ without interruption, becoming a dipthong that passes through /u/: it may be real, but unintentional. It's one of those things that if you convince yourself is real, you will tend to interpret what you are hearing in favor of that. E.g. in Moriama Naotarō's "Kisetsu no mado de" (季節の窓で), right in the first verse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FjvNqg3034 That's actually a good example because there are so many covers of that, you can see whether you hear the "whoopy wo" from differnt speakers. There is a similar situation in the pronunication o 千円. There is a ghost "ye" that appears to the foreign ear. To the point that we have developed the exonym "yen" for the Japanese currency!!! The reality is more like that the /n/ is nasalized, similarly to what happens when it is followed by /g/. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ONt6a1o-hg OK, finally, let's crack open the a 1998 edition of the the NHK日本語撥音辞典. On pages 832-833, we have all the /ho:/ words, with their pronunications including pitch accents: ホー with falling accent after ホ: 方、砲、鵬、朴 And, our cheeky word 頬 gets a separate entry here due to its pronunications ホー and ほほ。Both have a falling pitch after the leading ほ, like 方. No difference is noted. ホー with pitch rising at the "o": 法、報 So of course if you compare someone saying 法律 vs 頬, there will be a difference. But a lot of longer ほお words have the same rising pitch like 法. 法律 (ほうりつ） vs 放り出す （ほおりだす）is the same. Fairly intuitively, 頬張る（ほおばる）has rising pitch at the お、in spite of 頬 by itself exhibiting falling pitch. | | |
| ▲ | timr 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > This is literally not a thing that exists outside of some foreigners' imaginations. I think you're a little obsessed with this. It's not pitch accent and I'm not "being fooled", but if you want to insist that you know better...fine? You do you! > OK, finally, let's crack open the a 1998 edition of the the NHK日本語撥音辞典. On pages 832-833, we have all the /ho:/ words, with their pronunications including pitch accents: ホー with falling accent after ホ: 方、砲、鵬、朴 I've already given you examples where you can often hear the difference if you try. These "ho-words" are completely unrelated, and non-responsive. You seem to be arguing about something else (or just trying to name-drop the NHK pronunciation guide). Anyway, there are two distinct sounds in the kana table for う and お. They're individually pronounced differently, so why you're so resistant to the idea that combinations of the two might also have a difference in pronunciation, I don't really know. I've personally had native teachers tell me this, and I hear it all the time. Go ask a native to slowly sound out the individual mora for a word like 紅茶 vs. say, 大阪 -- that's how I first heard it. Anyway, I'm not really interested in debating this further. It's a very, very minor point. Good luck with your study. | | |
| ▲ | kazinator 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > there are two distinct sounds in the kana table for う and お. Oh no, that totally escaped my feeble attention. Boy, do I feel sheepishly stupid now. > Go ask a native to slowly sound out the individual mora In fact, now that you point it out, even if I do that myself, it's obvious they are different: ko-u-cha, o-o-sa-ka! Well, I've just been going about this all wrong, barking up the wrong tree. In hindsight it now makes total sense that they wouldn't just use う as a marker to indicate that the previous お is long. Thats what ー is for; whereas う has a sound! Ohohsaka, coacha: gonna practice that. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| ▲ | drtgh 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > What's the issue here? You need to know previously the word to write from Hepburn to Kana when "ō" is present because data is lost in such transliteration from おう or おお or オー to Hepburn. The internet is full of romanji written incorrectly with "o" alone when it should be "ou" or "oo" due "ō" ASCII conversion errors at one moment. (The sooner a beginner embrace Hiragana and Katakana, the better) |
