Re: uh?

Zhen Lin wrote: 
Bart Mathias wrote:

It depends how you define "sound." If you mean it as what distinguishes one word from another, then "standard" Japanese has exactly five vowels. (Some dialects might have fewer; at least one I know has more.)

Okinawan has 3 short, 5 long. Yonaguni has 3 in total. (And if you add the laryngealised consonants, it looks more and more like Arabophones speaking Japanese!)

I didn't include Okinawan, obviously (note the "might"), because I consider the Ryukyuan languages to be members or the Japanese language family, but not dialects.

The zu-zu-ben have 4 in certain (all?) environments.

This is what I was thinking of, but in spite of the <i> --> <e> business in things like [egu] for <iku>, and all the post-laminal fricative <i> --> <u>, I suspect that one still needs to differentiate five vowels to describe the dialect(s).

And there's the famous Nagoya-ben with 8... (a bit like German, methinks, with [a ä e i ö ü o u])

That's the one I had in mind with the "at least one I know has more." I mentioned Nagoya-ben in that respect here not very long ago.

If you mean allophones, it's somewhere between, but I think I generally made it about a dozen or so (distinguishing the four-way distinction of /u/ in /kuki/, /muki/, /suki/ and /sumu/, for example) in presentations to students, only five of which are really necessary to distinguish unless you want to pass as Japanese for the CIA or something.

Hmm, /kuki/ and /suki/ ought to have devoiced /u/;

/suki/ can have a devoiced high central unrounded (but "lip-pursed" for some speakers) vowel (I don't feel like looking up the ASCII IPA right now, but "/u/" lacks something in accuracy). I think /u/ is much more likely to be realized, in that word, as [s] (or [:]). It can even be voiced--especially, for example, in singing. A matter of free variation in Tokyo Japanese, but it takes extra effort to put an inaudible vowel between /s/ and /k/, whether underlyingly /u/ or /i/.

additionally, /suki/
might have a centralised /u/... /sumu/ might have a nasalised and centralised /u/. (And possibly a nasalised devoiced /u/ at the end.) /muki/ might have a nasalised /u/.

I used /sumu/ for the centralized /u/ (I should have used /sumi/ with no ambiguity), and /muki/ for the back /u/. Can you give any evidence that a post-voiced-consonant can be followed by a devoiced /u/? I've never heard of such a thing.

Hmm. Let me think a moment...

How's this:

Short:
[a E e i ï O o u ü]
[ja jO jo ju jü]

? To me, [ü] represents a high front rounded voiced vowel; I don't know a Japanese dialect that has such (Nagoya?). I would use [ï] for the /u/ in /sumi/. But maybe you mean what I would call [ï] and [I] respectively? The next section can almost be interpreted that way.

Devoiced:
[i ï u ü]
[ju jü]

Also /o/ and /a/, and probably /e/, though I can't provide an example. I'm a bit suspicious of [ju jü] here. You wouldn't use a [j] in transcribing things like /syuku/ | /Suku/, would you?

Nasal:
[a e i ï O o u ü]
[ja jO jo ju jü]
(Especially if we accept the pronunciation of /sensei/ as something like [see~se:])

Long:
[a: E: e: i: ï: O: o: u: ü:]
[ja: jo: ju: jü:]

I'm puzzled over [E:]. I took the [E] above as the sound in what I might spell as [mEt:ani], but when would the higher "e" occur long, distinct from [e:]? But if you meant what I first guessed for [E], I suppose you would have included it in the nasals, for words like /mENkurau/.

[ju: jü:] is also a distinction I can't figure out yet.

Nearly 4 dozen... though the case for classing long and palatalised separately is debatable. (Though, as you pointed out, the /a/ in /ja/ is almost always fronted, compared to /a/ alone.)

About three dozen more than I would have likely bothered students with. (Though of course I did bring up nasal vowels as allophones of /N/.) I think the long vowels tend to be farther from the "neutral" position (somewhere between /u/ and /a/) than the short ones, but I never made a big deal of it.

Bart
.

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