Random Thread ~Usagi-Chan ☮ Tūsurī~

[TotallyUncool]

I'm glad that the biopsies were normal - and that your case is proceeding. Good luck with everything!

[rikkikow]

Still present today.

Not as shy as years past.

[TotallyUncool]

That looks like a good yard for bugs, so I imaginee that they're finding plenty to eat!

[erilaz]

Gotta rant. I'm currently embroiled in an argument on another forum with someone who deems himself an authority on the Japanese language just because he's lived in Japan for 15 years, yet he makes this demonstrably false statement: "There's no need to depict 'long O' actually, and that isn't used in expressing Japanese in Japan. It's a perfectly phonetic language (zero exceptions), so O only has one sound, the long one... but no need to specifically point this out, because it's ALWAYS pronounced the same way."

I couldn't let this pass, since it was in response to something I myself had written (I had pointed out that I use a circumflex to mark long vowels in Japanese, since that forum does not support macrons). His reply to my response basically stated that I was rude (true, and I apologized) and wrong (not true), with no specific counter-arguments to what he thought was "wrong" about what I wrote. Meanwhile, I'm presenting linguistic data contrary to his claims about the language and have invited him to prove me wrong.

Urgh. Why do I even bother?

[Celedam]

^ From a bystander's perspective, reading that description of your argument, I'm not sure you're both using the same definition of "long vowel". I'm not even sure what a long vowel would be in Japanese, since it doesn't have vowels and consonants in the same sense that English does. It just has phonemes that we romanize with vowels and consonants, and even then many Japanese phonemes cannot be perfectly romanized, which is why there are competing romanization systems.

So with that in mind, o and ō/ou (depending on the romanization) have the same tone but different lengths. They're not like "low" versus "lose" in English.

[erilaz]

To quote the very first sentence of the chapter on Phonetics in An Introduction to Japanese Linguistics (3rd edition) by Natsuko Tsujimura, "When we try to list all the sounds in a language, it is important not to confuse orthography, i.e. the writing system, with the actual sounds." I'm talking primarily about vowel sounds here, not letters or characters. The terms "vowel" and "consonant" are used in linguistics to refer to certain types of speech sounds, regardless of their written representation. Since I'm conveying this message in writing, however, I will have to resort to using such written symbols.

Japanese has five basic (short) vowel sounds, those conventionally romanized as a, i, u, e, o and written in hiragana (when in isolation, not preceded by a consonant in the same syllable) as

Each of these five vowels has a long counterpart, which is pronounced essentially the same, but with longer duration. I wouldn't say that they have the same "tone", since that term has a different meaning in linguistic parlance, but despite terminological differences, I'm not telling you anything here that you don't already know about Japanese vowels.

I'm not sure you're both using the same definition of "long vowel".

You could very well be right about that. The term "long vowel" as applied to Japanese (and as used in linguistics generally) certainly does not mean the same thing as the term "long vowel" that we native speakers of English learned in elementary school to describe certain diphthongal sounds in our own language. These sounds were indeed "long vowels" in the linguistic sense (i.e. lengthened versions of their short counterparts) in English once upon a time, but that was before the Great Vowel Shift came and screwed everything up about 600 years ago.

[Celedam]

Okay, so did you tell that other person what you just told me?

[erilaz]

Posted, yes, but he hasn't responded to it yet. Nor to my previous post.

I'm not even addressing the other elephant in the room over there, namely "It's a perfectly phonetic language (zero exceptions)." What does that even mean? Is he talking about kana? Hepburn? Kunreishiki? Certainly not kanji. And the statement makes no sense whatsoever without reference to a writing system. Any way you slice it, これはちんぷんかんぷんです。

Wait, you mean that the particle "ha" is pronounced "wa"? And "n" is pronounced as "m" when it's before "p"? And the "u" at the end of "desu" is usually silent or nearly so?

Speaking of ちんぷんかんぷん (gibberish, nonsense), Google Translate is really producing it today! (It is April 1st in Japan....)
これはちんぷんかんぷんです。> This is a newspaper.
ちんぷんかんぷんです。> It is a short notice.
ちんぷんかんぷん > Chinese language school

[Zunu]

erilaz, I'm just curious what this opponent of yours had to say about things like その鳥 vs その通り?

And besides which, even if there were no phonetic difference between the short and long vowel forms, the purpose of the macron/circumflex is to have roumaji more-or-less bijectively correspond with kana. As you say, it's there for orthography, pronunciation be damned. To just disregard the long vowel markings which are already present in one form or another in Japanese orthography would be as if someone were to make a English-to-Unicode dictionary and decide that since the apostrophe doesn't make a sound, we'll just leave it out of the dictionary, so a word like "can't" gets Unicoded into 0063;0061;006E;0074 instead of 0063;0061;006E;0027;0074.

I just can't with that cant.

[erilaz]

I've provided him with a few examples of that sort, but he hasn't responded to any of them. His sole response following the post quoted above was essentially nothing more than "I've lived in Japan for 15 years, so how dare you disrespect my authoritah!"

If at this point he has just slunk away with his tail between his legs, that's fine by me. I already have more than enough to do this weekend.