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Japanese Phonetics Episode 50—LIVE (now with native recordings)!

🕑 Added 2018-10-03 13:40:37 +0000 UTC

Comments

Dogen

Hi, Sashin. JP here. A morpheme boundary refers to the "dividing line" between morphemes, which are units of sound. These often occur between kanji (like 場合), but not always. Dōgen also talks about morpheme boundaries in lesson 37, if you haven't seen that yet. (There are also brief mentions in lesson 39 and 40.) Hope this helps!

Sashin Exists

What's a morpheme boundary? Does that mean another kanji character? (like in 場合)

Dogen

My pleasure!

Hannah

Thank you so much for a recap video! Just like the pitch accent one I'll be playing this daily for awhile =D

Dogen

Hi Fred! Sorry for the late reply. Great question! Vance (2008) says that they do, but there isn't very much additional literature on this topic, and when it comes to weakening G and B are usually the main examples given, so I decided to stick with the mainstream literature and omit D weakening. That said, I may cover it in an 'additional good to be aware of points' type of video towards the end of the pronunciation sub-series. Hope that this answers your question. Thanks for the support! ^^

Fred Farrell

Hi Dogen, thanks for the great round up! Quick question, do the D sounds ever get reduced to fricatives like B and G? I've found myself doing it sometimes.

Dogen

Hi Chris! I haven’t decided yet, but most likely yes it will be in this upcoming lesson rather than the lesson on ん。Cheers!

Newchurch

Are you going to cover how the R sounds change after an ん or is that going to be part of the video for ん? Thanks as always for the fantastic and concise videos.

Dogen

Hi Skabahk, I will indeed! Glad to hear you're looking forward to the lesson!

skabahk

Very excited for the R's and glad you're gonna have a separate one for the ry_ sounds. Are you going to cover the rolling/trilling R sound in there too? Although I imagine it's just kinda natural if you're in the correct R position...

Dogen

No Problem Arthur! Glad to hear that you've noticed a significant improvement in your pitch recognition abilities! I touched a bit on this in the second video I did on vocal placement, but from what I can tell it's not so much that Japanese is very nasal, but that the resonance in the nasal chamber becomes more noticeable when the chest resonance isn't present. I can also tell you for sure that older speakers and speakers from certain regions of Japan speak with deeper voices, though with regards to the older speakers this is a universal linguistic phenomenon. There have been multiple academic studies however, which note that completely bilingual English—Japanese/Japanese—English speakers speak in a higher pitch when speaking in Japanese. Hope that this helps! Cheers!

Dogen

Hi Sascha, My pleasure! Sorry for the confusion, those are actually meant to indicate silence or a pause at the beginning or end of the displayed words. In retrospect I can definitely see it begin bit confusing though, with all the other IPA symbols through the video. I'll try to think of a better way to indicate this going forward!

Sascha Baer

Hey, thanks for the episode! At around 2:20 I believe the square brackets got shuffled around somehow though.

greyface

Thanks for another great video, Dogen. I feel that I am making great headway with my phonetic awareness and pronunciation, and have noticed that I can accurately guess the pitch accent patterns of many sentences. These resources have helped build a great phonetic foundation of my japanese studies! I just had a question regarding vocal placement. Is it possible that the higher nasally quality of Japanese is only found in a portion of natives and not all? The reason I ask is because I have heard a significant number of speakers with deep, reverberating voices or relaxed, non-nasally voices in spoken speech and in entertainment. Sometimes one does hear a significant amount of this nazalatization, but it doesn’t seem to be a rule as much as a common variation among a portion of speakers.