Talk:Japanese phonology

Pitch accent clarification

"An initial unaccented mora isn't always pronounced with low pitch when it occurs as part of a heavy syllable. Specifically, when the second mora of an accent phrase is /R/ (the latter part of a long vowel) or /N/ (the moraic nasal), the first two moras are optionally either LH (low-high) or HH (high-high). In contrast, when the second mora is /Q/ the first two moras are LL (low-low). When the second mora is /i/, initial lowering seems to apply as usual to the first mora only, LH (low-high)."

I've read this several times and can't make heads or tails of it. Japanese pitch accent doesn't include the words "bimoraic" or even "heavy" so I'm not sure where these diverged. Clarifications, examples, or redirection appreciated! DAVilla (talk) 07:53, 21 August 2024 (UTC)

This is talking about words like the following examples from the pitch accent article: kōban (first syllable is kō, which ends in /R/), manga (first syllable is man, which ends in /N/), seppuku (first syllable is sep, which ends in /Q/) and aijin (first syllable is ai, which ends in /i/). Words like kōban and manga start out with an HH or optionally LH pitch pattern, words like seppuku start with an LLH pitch pattern, and words like aijin start with an LH pitch pattern (these patterns apply when words start with a syllable of this form that is unaccented).--Urszag (talk) 11:00, 21 August 2024 (UTC)

Vowel nasalization

Regarding the recent edits by an IP who commented "Fixed incorrect information. Japanese's lack of nasalization can be seen objectively in MRI scans", but without adding additional sources. I have noticed contradictions between what different sources say about vowel nasalization in Japanese, and some of the previously cited sources were old and possibly outdated or based on impressionistic rather than quantitative analysis (e.g. Akamatsu 1997 pp 57, 298). So I'm not going to entirely revert the IP edits. Nevertheless, the statement "vowels next to nasal consonants do not exhibit nasalization" contradicts the currently cited source, Vance (2008), pp. 56–59, which says "a Japanese vowel is nasalized when it immediately precedes a syllable-final nasal consonant". To the IP editor, please find a source to back up the assertion that vowels are not nasalized even before syllable-final nasal consonants. The article would benefit from more recent, comprehensive sources on this topic, but we can't say something that isn't verifiable. Urszag (talk) 18:43, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

This is a different computer, but that's very reasonable criticism. I used https://rtmridb.ninjal.ac.jp/ to see MRI footage. I also wasn't fully correct. The ん sound does cause nasalization of the previous vowel if it is followed by a vowel or fricative, or preceded by a nasal consonant. On the other hand, if neither of these conditions are met, nasalization doesn't happen until the ん itself. Nasalization also doesn't occur before normal nasal consonants like ま. Words I looked at included hema, kaNtaN, siNsoH, niNmu, aNzeN, and kaNbu. The website dates itself to April 1st 2024, so it's certainly quite new. I'm not experienced with Wikipedia editing and apologize for the trouble, but I want this article to be as accurate as possible. 2605:AD80:14:7010:5044:583C:AAD3:825B (talk) 06:39, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for pointing me towards this resource! To give some background about Wikipedia policies, the norm is to make sure statements in articles can be supported by reliable secondary sources. That means any generalizations that can be made from this interesting data can't be put in the article until we can find a source to cite for analysis of this sort of data. I know having inaccurate or incomplete information in the article is frustrating, but the goal of that policy is to avoid the risk of having articles be based on amateur analysis rather than expert consensus. I'm going to try to see if I can find some papers that discuss these contextual factors to nasalization of the vowel before ん.--Urszag (talk) 22:57, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

Spinning off an onbin article

Since the article is getting on the longer side now, I was thinking it might make sense to create a separate article about onbin that could get more into the details of it as a historical process (rather than just part of the current language). I started a draft here: User:Urszag/Onbin but I wanted to share this suggestion now since I see @Mazamadao has been working now on expanding the onbin section. My thought would be that specific examples of lexical onbin, such as those currently listed in the "-hito" section (shirōto, etc.) are more a matter of diachronic change than synchronic phonology, and so could be moved into a new onbin article (I would also move dialect verb forms, since this article is not intended to comprehensively describe dialects other than standard Tokyo-based Japanese), while a summary of onbin changes, and examples of grammatical onbin in standard Japanese inflection, should remain in this article. Does anyone object to moving that material once a new article is created? Urszag (talk) 08:28, 8 September 2024 (UTC)

I published Onbin as its own article. Since nobody commented, I went ahead and moved the specific examples of onbin in compounds of hito/-bito to that page.--Urszag (talk) 06:41, 13 September 2024 (UTC)

Where are the consonants for じ・じゃ・じゅ・じょ and し・しゃ・しゅ・しょ?

They are part of Japanese Language but can't be found in the consonants table anywhere. Why? 2804:14C:120:2EC6:1CF3:C0BF:3BF6:1BA3 (talk) 05:19, 25 December 2024 (UTC)

They're there. They're in parentheses because they are not phonemic (in the analysis adopted by the article). Nardog (talk) 06:08, 25 December 2024 (UTC)

I thought it was really confusing for a layperson to understand where they were. The article states for instance that the Voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative is present in the language but doesn't make clear which sound in Japanese it corresponds to with examples.

I'd like to suggest the adoption of a table like the one found on the consonants section of this article Standard Chinese phonology. In this table examples are given showing which consonants in Mandarin corresponds to each sound in the IPA, withe example words and even pronunciation and comparison to English. That would be sure to make it more understandable for people not so familiar with the IPA transcription. I, for instance, couldn't tell which sound the Voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative was, because I expected the sound instead to be Voiceless postalveolar fricative. 2804:14C:120:2EC6:1CF3:C0BF:3BF6:1BA3 (talk) 19:29, 25 December 2024 (UTC)

[ɸ] to [ç] phonetic shift clarification

Under this subheading, near the bottom of the second-to-last paragraph, it is explained that "The labial fricative [ɸ] could be found before all vowels up through Late Middle Japanese, but was eventually debuccalized to [h] before any vowel other than /u/, resulting in the modern Japanese /h/ phoneme." I believe the explanation would benefit from more clarity on how [ɸ] shifted to [ç] before /i/, especially as it currently seems to incorrectly suggest that /h/ is realised as [h] rather than [ç] before /i/.

Unfortunately I do not know, so I am requesting that somebody more well-versed than me in this topic could please provide the clarification. I realise there is a possibility this may seem lazy if the standard procedure would be to research this myself and either make the edit or suggest the exact edit with sources, so I apologise if this is the case. However I thought in any case it would be more helpful to bring it up than do nothing, so I decided to open this topic. Jai (talk) 18:58, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

I've edited the description of the sound change to account for [ç]. I don't recall if any sources specifically talk about the steps in its evolution.--Urszag (talk) 23:45, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

Labrune 2012 as a source for details on devoicing of non-high vowels

@Mazamadao: Thanks for your edits to the article! I haven't yet read the sources that Labrune (2012) cites about devoicing of non-high vowels, but I'm uneasy with all of the restrictions that Labrune postulates and with the statistic that /e/ is least likely to be devoiced. Fujimoto (2015), a more recent and perhaps more comprehensive overview of this topic, says on page 169 that a study by Maekawa and Kikuchi in 2005 found devoicing rates of 2.10%, 3.31%, and 3.45% respectively for /a, e, o/, which would make /a/ and not /e/ the least likely to undergo devoicing (Fujimoto also mentions the conflicting studies that found /e/ to be least likely, and concludes that "it is not clear" which is most likely to devoice). We could go over this contradictory information in the article, but the article is already getting a bit lengthy and I'm not sure it's useful to be more detailed here rather than just avoiding commenting on this specific question, which doesn't seem of clear importance. I'm also not convinced the restrictions mentioned by Labrune are clearly established enough to warrant our repeating them. The restriction "followed by the same vowel in the following mora" is not claimed to apply to /e/ by Labrune: in fact, Labrune's examples for e̥ are counterexamples to that (sekkaku and keshō). Counterexamples for [ḁ] and [o̥] are mentioned by Fujimoto, namely [kḁkɯte:] 'local train' and [hanayakḁ] 'brilliant' and [te:ʃo̥kɯ] 'steady job'. So even if devoicing is more common when the same vowel follows, this doesn't seem to be an inviolable constraint, and I'm not sure how helpful Labrune's "in theory" wording is. Urszag (talk) 09:27, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

Feel free to cite other sources that say otherwise. I won't editorialize and will simply paraphrase what I've read. I'm not the one to direct these questions too, I'm just a book reader. Mazamadao (talk) 11:33, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

Kochetov 2014 and Kochetov 2018 as sources on articulation of coronal consonants

There's a disagreement between me and Mazamadao about whether to include these sources. You can see the arguments for and against inclusion in the article history and on my Talk page. Responding to Mazamadao's last comment there: the term "laminal denti-alveolar" has never been my own unique understanding, but is Kochetov's own description of the place of articulation of consonants like /t/. Urszag (talk) 10:13, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

There's no such thing as "Kochetov's own description." Kochetov doesn't offer any unique description, but merely cites Vance and Okada. If the first-hand accounts are already cited in this article, why would you need someone's second-hand account? To be clear, whenever I read "dental" as regarding /t, d/, I tend to think of it as somewhere that can be characterized as "denti-alveolar", but that does not give me license to change the wording however I want. I'd like you to demonstrate clearly that Kochetov has indepedently verified "denti-alveolar", not just citing someone else who doesn't use that term.Mazamadao (talk) 10:31, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

And to be extra clear, it's not just "denti-alveolar", but also "laminal".Mazamadao (talk) 10:33, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

Here are the relevant passages in Kochetov's Voicing and Tongue-Palate Contact Differences in Japanese Obstruents (2014). I added bold type.

"The results of the study are largely consistent with previously reported voicing differences (except for Dagenais et al 's 1994 results for stops). Specifically, we found that Japanese voiced alveolar /d/ was consistently produced with less linguopalatal contact than voiceless /t/. The degree of contact difference was primarily due to the relative anterior-to-posterior width of the closure at the alveolar ridge (narrower for /d/), but was also affected by the lateral contact in the palatal region (less for /d/). Unlike for /t/, the anterior edge of the closure for /d/ was slightly less advanced, and the closure was often less occluded (especially, but not exclusively, before high vowels). Similar results have been reported for alveolar stops in British English, German, Hindi, and Norwegian (Dixit 1990, Moon and Simonsen 1997, Fuchs and Perrier 2003, Fuchs 2005). Previous EPG studies of Japanese showed a similar difference in the degree of contact (Shibata 1968, Fujii 1970), likely reflecting differences in articulatory force (Matsumura et al 1994, Wakumoto et al 1998). Together with these studies, our results thus show that Japanese voiced alveolar /d/ is also subject to lenition (contra to previous descriptive phonetic accounts: Vance 1987, Okada 1999), yet the magnitude of this process is likely to be smaller than the lenition of velar /g/ and labial /b/, and likely less auditorily salient.

The observed contact differences between Japanese /t/ and /d/ are relatively robust, which is possibly due to the overall high degree of contact for these consonants that are commonly described as laminal denti-alveolars (Vance 1987, p. 18, Okada 1999). Similarly clear differences were observed in Hindi and Norwegian /t, d/, which are also laminal denti-alveolars (Dixit 1990, Moon and Simonsen 1997)."

Basically, Kochetov doesn't independently claim that /t, d/ are "laminal denti-alveolars", but only points out that Vance and Okada say so. Vance (1987) and Okada (1999) are cited in this article. If you want to cite them, you are free to do so, but everybody else is also free to verify whether the claim is found in the sources. Okada uses the term "dental" and I don't see any reason why I have to rely on Kochetov's interpretation that it means "denti-alveolar", because unless Kochetov can independently come up with their own description, however they personally interpret Okada's "dental" is irrelevant. What Okada says is what they say, it shouldn't be filtered through somebody else's mouth.

As for Shibata (1968), Fujii (1970), Matsumura et al (1994), Wakumoto et al (1998), these are about how much /d/ makes less palatal contact than /t/, and how /d/ is subject to lenition, which are irrelevant to the claim in question, that /t/, /d/ AND /n/ are "laminal denti-alveolar."Mazamadao (talk) 11:12, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

@Urszag: "There are a number of reasons to cite Kochetov in addition to citing Vance and Okada. For one thing, Kochetov's articles are accessible via jstage whereas Vance and Okada's books are not; Kochetov's articles are also more recent sources. Furthermore, while Kochetov cites Vance and Okada in that particular part of the article, my point is that it's clear Kochetov overall is familiar with more sources of information on this topic than just Vance and Okada's descriptions, so there's no reason to assume that Kochetov's description is solely an "interpretation" (you seem to be suggesting a misinterpretation?) of these two sources." These are troublesome reasoning. Apparently if it's free and more recent, it should be included? To what end exactly? And again, why would you need a second-hand account if a first-one already exists, accessible, albeit not completely free and not recent? You're grasping at straws with that whole "Kochetov cites Vance and Okada in that particular part of the article" despite that's where the only instance of "laminal denti-alveolar" is found. I have to caution you again, it's not just the "denti-alveolar", which I did find on page 65, it's also the "laminal" part. You can only cite Kochetov to the extent that your claim is only "denti-alveolar." The word "laminal" is literally not anywhere else in that entire paper.Mazamadao (talk) 11:49, 8 February 2025 (UTC)