A phoneme is a vowel or a consonant, never a combination of the two.
Japanese does have vowels and consonants. In Japanese, almost every syllable consists in a single consonant followed by a single vowel. (Some syllables end with a nasal consonantal sound.)
Japanese people tend to add a Japanese ‘u’ sound to the end of English words (and syllables) that end in a consonant because their native language usually doesn’t allow a syllable to end with a consonant. But it’s not because they somehow can’t hear a consonant unless it’s got a vowel after it. They can hear it, they’re just not used to it.
)
Hmmm…I looked it up and phoneme was defined as “The smallest phonetic unit in a language that is capable of conveying a distinction in meaning”. The Westernized spellings use a vowel and consonant for each of the sounds, but when Japanese characters are used, it is a single character representing the entire sound, and cannot be broken up into smaller parts: ra, ri, ru, re, ro, for example, are basic sounds and cannot be broken up into their constituent “consonant” and “vowel” sounds, because the concepts of consonant and vowel, or “spelling”, for that matter, do not exist in the language. At least that is my understanding.
They don’t just add a ‘u’’; they transform the final syllable into katakana, using one of the syllables of their language. It might be a ‘u’ sound or an ‘o’ sound or whatever the sound of the syllable they are using. English words are sounded out phonetically using their own syllablic language, in a similar way to which we would say Spanish, French, or German words using our own English pronunciation of the letters.
Obviously, I meant they can’t hear it because they’re not used to it. What did you think I meant, that they have a genetic inability to hear consonants? Ha, ha! Do you think I’m an idiot?
Nonsense. “Marry” and “merry”, at least, are definitely distinct from one another in my dialect (Louisiana native, long-term Texas resident), though the distinction is somewhat subtle. The middle of “marry” sounds like “air”, and the middle of “merry” sounds like “err”, if that helps. If not, the best I can describe it is as a slight drop in pitch between the “a” and the “r” in “marry” that is not present in “merry”.
“Mary” is a little trickier to distinguish, because it sort of falls in between the other two, but it the difference is usually noticeable.
That definition is just about the same as the one given in The Handbook of the International Phonetic Association (Here I actually quote Wikipedia quoting that text…) According to them, a phoneme is
Both of these definitions imply that, in Japanese, sounds like “ka” and “sa” are not phonemes. For the difference between the “k” in “ka” and the “s” in “sa” is enough to convey a “distinction in meaning,” or a “meaningful contrast between utterances.” The phonemes, then, are the “k” and the “s”. (If they were not phonemes, then Japanese speakers would not make a distinction between, for example, the utterance “kono” and the utterance “sono”. But those are two different words in Japanese. Finding pairs of words like this is called finding “minimal pairs” and it’s one of the ways phonemes are identified.)
This is pretty much how I listen to operas in a language I don’t speak. I usually know enough to ascertain what language I’m hearing, but for all I know they could be singing the lyrics to “Louie Louie.” Of course it adds to the experience if I know what they’re singing, but there are entire operas that are just gibberish to me.
But musically, I always find myself drawn to operas in Italian, because of the placement of the vowels.
Here too. I was born and raised here, then lived in NYC for 25 years, during which I learned to pronounce “marry,” “merry” and “Mary” differently. Now that I’m back in Cleveland I have to re-learn to pronounce them all “merry.”
Phonemes are the distinguishable, meaningful classes that the raw sounds (the phones) of a language fall into. They’re combinations of features such as the place of articulation, voicing, aspiration, and so on that make a sound able to be identified and classified as a unit of language. The exact waveforms vary with the pitch of the speaker’s voice, how fast he’s speaking, the positions of the sounds words, and so on. In order for language to have any chance at all of being useful in communicating anything, speakers have to draw a box around some space of sounds and declare everything in it to be say, an ‘s’ sound, regardless of what other features it may have. That box is a phoneme.
English speakers, for example, consider ‘top’ and ‘stop’ to have the same “t sound” [t], even though its pronunciations in the two words aren’t identical; the former is aspirated and the latter isn’t, but aspiration isn’t phonemic in English. In Japanese, [h] has three different allophones in complementary distribution, depending on the vowel it precedes (except for the moraic nasal [N], syllable-final consonants are forbidden). Its articulation is palatal before * or [j] (so that it sounds like the German ich-Laut), bilabial before the Japanese equivalent of u (as in Spanish huevos, but unvoiced), and glottal elsewhere (as in English). The usual way to prove that two sounds represent distinct phonemes is to find minimal pairs, words that differ only in the two sounds yet can be distinguished by listeners. For example, “confusion” and “Confucian” show that the ‘sh’ and ‘zh’ sounds are distinct in English. On the other hand, there aren’t any minimal pairs in English distinguishing unaspirated ‘p’ from aspirated ‘ph’. That distinction is phonemic in other languages such as Icelandic, though.
The phonemes of a language don’t necessarily have anything to do with its writing system. Japanese can be written with a syllabary; but as mentioned above, there are minimal pairs that show that each hiragana or katakana character except for the pure vowels are actually combinations of two phonemes. Mandarin Chinese doesn’t have any kind of phonemic alphabet at all, but the language certainly has phonemes. In the opposite direction, the English alphabet has the letter “c” that usually represents [s] or [k], for which there are already letters.
All this doesn’t have much to do with the original post, but hopefully it’s helpful somewhere.
Thanks. It seems like the definition I read for “phoneme” isn’t really correct. Perhaps the word “syllable” would have been a better choice. The point I was trying to get across is that the Japanese language does not use vowels as individual “units”. The vowel sounds are part of syllables, and cannot be separated from a given syllable, as they can in English. English words are pronounced by approximating the sounds with Katakana syllables. For example, “receipt” would be re-shi-to. “Burger” would be ba-ga. “Spaghetti” would be su-pa-ge-ti. Hope that’s clear now.
I still don’t get it. If the people actually consider kono and sono not to be four separate sounds, but only two, why should we decide for them that there are four? Why should we consider ko and so to contain one different phoneme and one similar one, when they consider them to be completely different?
Assuming they do, of course. If that part is incorrect, then I withdraw my incredulity.
Whoah. I walked into a storm there. I am not American. Hence, the three sounds merry, Mary and marry are different. Merry has a recognisably shorter middle vowel than Mary. Like the difference between Ben and bairn. Marry is as recognisably different from merry as the difference between “man” and “men”.
In Japan you will often find the hiragana and katakana syllabaries arranged into grids with columns sharing the same consonants and rows sharing the same vowels. This seems to indicate that they do consider each of the kana to represent a sequence of two sounds, rather than considering each to represent a single sound.
In any case, for the purposes of the science of Linguistics, it’s not too important what they consider to make up a single sound. What matters is whether the concept “phoneme” as defined above is theoretically fruitful when applied to all languages, including Japanese–and it is.
ETA: The traditional grid I mentioned is on display here, under “how to write Hiragana.”
