Re: uh?
- From: The Wanderer <inverseparadox@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 03 Nov 2005 20:56:58 -0500
Bart Mathias wrote:
The Wanderer wrote:
Marc Adler wrote:
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 giving 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) [...]
(I'd like to note here that, contrary to what I wrote at the time, I've actually had more trouble matching "o" as in "toff" than "e" as in "pet".)
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).
....you learn something new every day, I suppose; I wasn't aware that there *was*, formally, any variation in that range.
Is there ever a context, in Japanese, in which a given usage of a vowel is required to have a particular pronunciation from the range of possibilities?
It might have been helpful, earlier in this, to define "transcribe" in this context; I would have taken it to mean something like "represent in
such a way that someone reading it can readily reproduce the same sound
which is being transcribed". This paragraph may or may not belong here,
but the fact seems worth noting and I don't see any better place to put
it.
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.
I may have missed noticing your mentioning that. (I'll note here, in passing, that we are operating - at best - at the very outer limit of my understanding of grammar- and pronunciation-related terminology; for one thing, I don't think I've ever heard the term "fronting" before.)
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."
Hmm. I would not have considered the "a" in "cat" to be anywhere near the same as the "a" in "quatre"; the vowel in "cat" is indeed the one which I was unable to find a way to represent (alone) in Japanese, but I would have pronounced "quatre" as roughly rhyming with "caught her".
And one of the characteristics of what I call チンピラ語 is a general fronting of that vowel.
....I'm not being able to parse that katakana, at least not into anything English; the best I've managed to do is a somewhat slurred "simpler", which doesn't make much sense.
But of course you are right that there is no way to deliberately distinguish the many sounds of Japanese vowels in kana.
Since I'd have said, before tonight, that anyone who claimed that there were more than (to be generous) about eight Japanese vowel sounds in total didn't know what they were talking about, I don't know if I can claim much snootiness over that one.
--
The WandererWarning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any side of it.
Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny. .
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