Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Japanese vowels are sometimes phonetically voiceless. There is no phonemic contrast between voiced and voiceless versions of a vowel, but the use of voiceless vowels is often described as an obligatory feature of standard Tokyo Japanese, in that it sounds unnatural to use a voiced vowel in positions where devoicing is usual. [200]
The Japanese liquid is most often realized as an alveolar tap [ɾ], though there is some variation depending on phonetic context. [1] /r/ of American English (the dialect Japanese speakers are typically exposed to) is most commonly a postalveolar central approximant with simultaneous secondary pharyngeal constriction [ɹ̠ˤ] or less commonly a retroflex approximant [ɻ].
The word タクシー (takushī, ' taxi ') written vertically with vertical chōonpu. The chōonpu (Japanese: 長音符, lit. "long sound symbol"), also known as chōonkigō (長音記号), onbiki (音引き), bōbiki (棒引き), or Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark by the Unicode Consortium, is a Japanese symbol that indicates a chōon, or a long vowel of two morae in length.
In Japanese this is an important distinction in pronunciation; for example, compare サカ saka "hill" with サッカ sakka "author". Geminated consonants are common in transliterations of foreign loanwords; for example, English "bed" is represented as ベッド (beddo).
Japanese is an agglutinative, synthetic, mora-timed language with simple phonotactics, a pure vowel system, phonemic vowel and consonant length, and a lexically significant pitch-accent. Word order is normally subject–object–verb with particles marking the grammatical function of words, and sentence structure is topic–comment.
Although Kunrei-shiki romanization is the style favored by the Japanese government, Hepburn remains the most popular method of Japanese romanization. It is learned by most foreign students of the language, and is used within Japan for romanizing personal names, locations, and other information, such as train tables and road signs.
[12] [13] [14] For example, the short vowel a (pronounced like a schwa) is assigned a value of one mātrā, the long vowel ā is assigned a value of two mātrā s, and the compound vowel (diphthong) ai (which has either two simple short vowels, a+i, or one long and one short vowel, ā+i) is assigned a value of two mātrā s.
This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of Japanese on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Japanese in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them.