Re: uh?

The Wanderer wrote: 
Marc Adler wrote:

Paul Blay wrote:

I mean transcribing.


So you want to transcribe "uh?". That would be あ？


No, it wouldn't - not quite; close, but not identical. 
>
> I've been forced to conclude, after givning the issue a fair amount of
> thought some time back, that Japanese does not contain any way to
> represent several different sounds which in English are alternate
> pronunciations of the vowels. Specificaly, I've been unable to find a
> way to represent "a" as in "fast", "e" as in "pet", "i" as in "fist",
> and "u" as in "duh" (which last is, unless I'm much mistaken, the
> sound at hand) [...]

But the sound of "duh" does fall into the total (allophonic and free-variation) range of the vowel of the あ列 (which includes, not surprisingly, あ). My impression is that it is most likely to occur before a long consonant, quasi-allophonically, but as I reported earlier, my first encounter with it was from a Japanese person naming the kana ザ for me.

The fronting of や, or particularly, きゃ and ぎゃ, ends up with a vowel approaching that of the "a" in cat, probably at least as fronted as the "a" in French "quatre." And one of the characteristics of what I call チンピラ語 is a general fronting of that vowel.

But of course you are right that there is no way to deliberately distinguish the many sounds of Japanese vowels in kana.

Bart
.

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