I’m a fan of Japanese jazz pianist Hiromi Uehara. There is also a Uehara who plays Major League baseball.
Unfortunately, I’ve never actually heard the name spoken by a native Japanese speaker.
It has long been my understanding that, in the Japanese language, adjacent vowel sounds are, in most cases, pronounced separately. (That is, when the Japanese is rendered in romaji/Roman characters.) In actual practice, what little spoken Japanese I’ve heard has tended to blend the two vowel sounds into a single sound, and that sound is what you would get if you pronounced the two Roman vowels consecutively but sort of run together.
As a result, when I first saw the name “Uehara”, my brain said, “weh-HA-ra”.
However, when I hear baseball announcers speaking the name, most of them pronounce it “OO-ee-HA-ra”. None of these announcers have been native Japanese speakers. I’ve also heard enough mispronunciation of Spanish names by baseball announcers that I don’t have complete confidence that they’re pronouncing this Japanese name correctly. For one thing, I know that the Japanese sound represented as “e” has more of an “eh” sound to it, not an “ee” sound.
I haven’t spoken Japanese since I was five years old (except for a class I took at UCLA in the '80s), so take this as you will. I would pronounce it ‘oo-eh-hah-ra’, with the tongue touching the roof of the mouth so that it’s a combined ‘l/r’ sound (like in ‘Gojira’), and with no emphasis on any syllable.
Not Japanese, but my best guess based on the names of Japanese folks I know would be “oo-ey-ha-ra”. That’s “oo” rhymes with “blue” and “ey” rhymes with “hey”.
I’d be pretty certain it is not pronounced with “weh”/“way” as the first syllable, as that sound isn’t really used in modern Japanese.
Trick for pronouncing the Japanese “r”:
Say “pudding”
now “puddin”
now “puddin” really fast, with slight emphasis on the first syllable
the “dd” will start to sound like a combination of “r” “l” and “d”
now it sounds like “purin” with the Japanese r-sound
note how your tongue is moving, and try to replicate that for other r-sounds.
Kinda convoluted, but it works.
…or just pronounce it like a normal English “r”. No one’s gonna misunderstand it or anything.
Pronunciation also depends on regional accents. Remember the Nagano Olympics? How Nagano was pronounced (where the stress was) depended on which Prefecture the speaker lived.
I can’t speak more than a few words of Japanese but I thought there was no stressing of any syllables in Japanese other than when marked with a “stress mark”.
I’ve always used the name “Katy” or the word “kitty”, which in my dialect contain the alveolar tap/flap naturally. Though as always using words is unreliable since it depends on the person’s accent.
There’s also some pseudo-stressing because Japanese is a tonal language. Yes, Japanese is tonal, it* actually has some really weird rules for tonality (for instance, if I recall correctly, the pitch can’t fall after it raises within the same word). It’s not as heavily or obviously tonal as, say, Chinese though (and I understand that most Japanese people don’t consciously notice that it’s tonal). And yes, I have a cite, but unfortunately it’s not web accessible (without a subscription at least), try to find the Illustrations of the IPA: Japanese article if you have access to the IPA Journal, I think it was published around 1992 or so – it has some examples of tonal minimal pairs.
And by “it” I mean boring academic modern Tokyo dialect. Your dialect may differ.
Use the wrong intonation in Chinese and you may get a completely different word. Use the wrong intonation in Japanese and you just sound like a funny foreigner. Err… sound more like a funny foreigner.
There is some rule of stress. Meaning of words differ by the intonation. For example, hashi can mean either bridge or chopsticks- ha/SHI for bridge and HA/shi for chopsticks. There are a lot of words like this. What makes it even more complicated is that the Tokyo and Kyoto dialects are flipped, so in Tokyo ha/SHI is bridge but in Kyoto ha/SHI is chopsticks. :smack:
I like to think of it equivalent to how we differentiate with intonation with words such as Polish/polish and produce the papers/she bought produce. Not exactly the same, but similar to that affect.
There are some other things about intonation like not sounding so foreign when talking. When I lived there for a year one teacher tried to teach us with long words, waving his hand up and down to show where the higher intonations should be, but I never saw a pattern to the madness and as a result never really understood it.
It means lips close together, almost touching, leaving a smaller space for the sound to get out. The “compression” is relative to their more relaxed position for /u/ in other languages.
All my life I’ve been telling people that it’s similar to a Spanish rolled r. Is this not a close approximation? Mind you, I’ve always had a problem pronouncing both.
