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Japanese Phonetics Episode 49—LIVE (now with native recordings)!

🕑 Added 2018-09-17 05:37:05 +0000 UTC

Comments

Dogen

Hi, Gambel. JP here. I discussed your question with Dōgen. He said, “You are correct in assuming that it should be pronounced as B, and Vance talks about this in The Sounds of Japanese. If you are pronouncing it as a V then they’re essentially mixing languages while speaking. Vance talks about this on pages 80 and 81 of The Sounds of Japanese (you can find this in the bibliography here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/17345632). Some people might use it, but it’s not standard, and would probably make people raise eyebrows.” If I can add in my own little anecdote to Dōgen’s reply—years ago I had a classmate with a surname beginning with “Von…”. When translating everyone’s surname to katakana our (native Japanese) teachers intentionally used ヴォン instead of ボン because it more closely fit the pronunciation, but they also emphasized that ヴォ is uncommon and many Japanese people might prefer to use ボ. Hope this helps!

Gambel

Hi Dogen, sorry if you've answered this before but I can't find it anywhere. Are you aware of what ways one can/should pronounce "v" sounds suck as ヴァ、ヴィ、ヴ、ヴェ、ヴォ? I know the consonant [v] does not occur in standard Japanese so I would think most speakers pronounce the sounds with a [b], but I'm wondering if any speakers (particularly Japanese people who speak a language that DOES have [v]) ever pronounce the sounds with a [v], and if this sounds unnatural or incorrect.

RedAgent14

[p] becoming [ɸ] when slurred is actually the reason that [p] is represented by ぱ and not は. From what I understand, dakuten serves as an indicator that the marked kana should be pronounced voiced. Originally, [p] and [b] followed the same pattern as the rest of the voiced-unvoiced kana pairs; however (from my understanding), because [p] becomes [ɸ] when slurred, the entire は行 row shifted to [ɸ]. Thus, when [p] was reintroduced to the language, it got a "half-voiced mark" (I assume to indicate that it was somewhere between [ɸ] and [b]).

Dogen

Thanks for pointing this out Maksymilian! Updating now.

Maksymilian Strzelecki

Hi Dogen. Is there any reason why the index page doesn't list new episodes? The last one on the list is the 43rd episode.

Dogen

Glad to hear you enjoyed it Simon! Haha I enjoy that bit as well because until that point I’m usually standing and talking in front of the camera for 1~2 hours. Thanks for the continued support!

tensaimon

Another great episode, interesting that "p" is so uncommon, I'd never really thought about that before. Also, I love your jaunty walk off screen at the end, I find myself looking forward to it every episode...