Correct pronunciation of Japanese family name "Uehara"

[Jragon]

@Mister_Rik

Now that actually sounds much closer to my original guess than what I hear the baseball announcers say.

Keep in mine that “weh” is more or less a sped up version of “ue”. Japanese is a rather fast language, if you were to hear the whole word “at speed” it is correctly “uehara” and not “we” hara. If you imagine beats (like in music, 1-2-3-4), in “ue” the sounds “u” and “e” both take one beat: 1(u)-2(e)-3(ha)-4(ra), “[weh]hara” is more like: 1(we)-2(ha)-3(ra). So you’re kind of right that it sounds like “weh”, but “in context” so to speak it’s ue.

(Though I’m sure there are some speakers/dialects that frequently merge “ue” into “weh”).

[TreacherousCretin]

@Johanna

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.

10-Q veddy much!

[Nava]

@Darryl_Lict

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.

I’m not sure which is the one you call “rolled r” (sorry, I just don’t understand most English descriptions of pronunciations), but the Japanese people I’ve met never had a problem pronouncing either Spanish r.

[Chefguy]

I think it’s pronounced “Sin-jin”.

[Mister_Rik]

@Jragon

Keep in mine that “weh” is more or less a sped up version of “ue”. Japanese is a rather fast language, if you were to hear the whole word “at speed” it is correctly “uehara” and not “we” hara. If you imagine beats (like in music, 1-2-3-4), in “ue” the sounds “u” and “e” both take one beat: 1(u)-2(e)-3(ha)-4(ra), “[weh]hara” is more like: 1(we)-2(ha)-3(ra). So you’re kind of right that it sounds like “weh”, but “in context” so to speak it’s ue.

(Though I’m sure there are some speakers/dialects that frequently merge “ue” into “weh”).

That’s pretty much what I meant in my OP, when I said,

[QUOTE=Mister Rik]
and that sound is what you would get if you pronounced the two Roman vowels consecutively but sort of run together.
[/QUOTE]

In other words, yeah, they’re technically separate, but spoken quickly enough they blend into one sound.

As far a differences in dialect, for what it’s worth, Hiromi Uehara (the musician) is from Shizuoka Prefecture, while Koji Uehara (the baseball player) is from Osaka. I see from a map that Shizuoka is not far from Tokyo, but I’ve heard quite a few times that the Osaka dialect is different from the Tokyo dialect.

[mbh]

@Nava

I’m not sure which is the one you call “rolled r” (sorry, I just don’t understand most English descriptions of pronunciations), but the Japanese people I’ve met never had a problem pronouncing either Spanish r.

We gringos have a hard time remembering that Spanish-speakers consider “R” and “RR” to be two separate letters. To us, “RR” sounds like a modified “R”. So we refer to it as a rolled “R”.

“pero” = normal
“perro” = rolled

[Johanna]

@mbh

“pero” = normal

^ Flap (or tap).

“perro” = rolled

^ Trill.

Japanese doesn’t trill. The Japanese *r *is an alveolar lateral flap. The Spanish single /r/ as in pero is an alveolar flap, but not lateral, is the difference.

[Jragon]

@Johanna

Japanese doesn’t trill.

In general, no, but judging from Japanese TV, if you’re trying to talk like a tough guy you change your r sounds into trills all over the place. It’s kind of weird, I never quite figured out exactly what the rules are (if any), but I do notice that tough guys (especially really conceited or musclebound ones) tend to do it.

[Sleel]

Uehara has already been answered, really. The announcers probably aren’t butchering it, though they obviously don’t sound exactly right. Ballpark is fine for this situation.

There are three basic tone patterns: falling, rising, and flat, but differ from region to region. “Flat” is not really flat since the pitch typically does change, it just doesn’t change as much or as dynamically as the other pitch patterns. 標準語 (hyôjungo; the Japanese version of Received Pronunciation) is supposedly refined Tokyo and the surrounding Kanto area, but there are many slight regional accents even in that area. The Kansai area (Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe) is quite noticeably different sounding. There are also vocabulary and verb ending variations, quite aside from the pitches. Aomori and areas up north speak damn near a different language; it’s famously unintelligible to people from outside the area.

One of the hard parts for Japanese learning English is that they perceive tone shifts and vowel length differently. English is a stress-timed language, and they read too much into the changes. It drives them nuts when the stress changes depending on the emphasis you want to give. In Japanese the tones and vowel lengths are meaningful, so the changes constantly confuse them.

The other way around, English speakers have a hell of a time distinguishing the difference between long and short vowels in some situations, or pitches most of the time. You’re just a vowel length away from saying “I have a problem. My boyfriend isn’t getting hard,” instead of, “I have a problem. My curry isn’t setting up.” Or, if you mess up the tones, you could say, “Candy is falling,” instead of, “It’s raining.”

People will understand, most of the time, because one of the cultural differences is that more of the burden in communication is supposed to fall on the listener. Also, given the constraints of consonant+vowel, and the relatively few sounds of Japanese, it’s not surprising that there are a lot of homophones. An awful lot of interpretation in Japanese depends on context.