What extra vowels? Japanese doesn’t have any vowels that English doesn’t have, unless you count the final -n. In fact, I’d say English has more vowel sounds than Japanese (for example, Japanese has no equivalent to what we call the ‘schwa’ in English).
No … John Mace meant “vowels thrown into a given Engllish word to break up consonant clusters and facilitate pronunciation for native Japanese speakers”.
Think more of “extra syllables”. The one-syllable English word “glass” comes out as three syllables for a Japanese speaker, whose native speech patterns dictate that a vowel come between the “g” and the “l”, and that a vowel ends the word.
This thing has been bugging me all day for some strange reason…
The more I think about the American English pronuciation of the “r” sound, the odder it seems-- it’s not very similar to even its closest I-E language relatives (German, etc) much less other I-E languages like French or Spanish. In comparing the Japanese “r” sound with languages other than American English, perhaps that sound is closer to what that letter represents than it is to the “l” sound. And I specifically mention American English because that “r” sound is different even when compaed to the “r” sound in British English.
You are correct – the “American English r”, known phonetically as a “voiced alveolar approximant”, is not common among the world’s languages. Many of the languages that do feature this sound are Australian Aboriginal languages.
I knew I should have been clearer… I was thinking about the Queen’s English; ie, literally how the Queen and her cohert would pronounce it. Does she ever pronounce “r” like someone from Texas?
Are you thinking of word-intial r’s (as in red), or r’s that follow vowels (as in card, bore, butter)? IIRC, the former is pretty much identical for most varieties of both American and British English.
You can, however, expect some “Spanish-style” tapped r’s from the English speakers of Jamaica and Belize.
Yes, even the initial “r” sound gets trilled a bit when the Queen is speaking. But most Brits do pronounce at least the initial “r” pretty much like Americans.
