I know of a few examples of non-phonetic kana. The first one is へ as in

どこへ行きますか

which is actually pronounced え. The second one is は, as in

私は日本語が少しわかります。

which is actually pronounced わ. Arguably を is a third example (it's pronounced お, but I can't readily come up with an example where this would sound distinctly different from "wo").

Are there any other examples?

TIA!

gfb345 Wrote:Are there any other examples?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_...rthography
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%AD%B4%E...D%E9%81%A3

..granted, you'll hardly ever see this today, but sooner or later you will run into it

Evil_Dragon Wrote:

gfb345 Wrote:Are there any other examples?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_...rthography
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%AD%B4%E...D%E9%81%A3

..granted, you'll hardly ever see this today, but sooner or later you will run into it

Great! I had wondered what ゑ was all about, but I don't recall ever even having seen ゐ before. Thanks!

The canonical example is 言う (いう), which is pronounced ゆう. The tricky part is that the い -> ゆ change is not the only non-phonetic part. う often means "holding the preceding vowel," and いう (or ゆう) is actually ユー. You'll find more phonetic examples like "まーまー、そーゆーなって (= まあまあ、そういうなって in the proper non-phonetic orthography)" in manga, blogs and the like.

Another example is 東京 (とうきょう). Its pronunciation is トーキョー. So 通 as in 通る (とおる) has exactly the same sound as 東 while usually 通 is written as とお in kana and 東 とう.

There are many other examples like these, but I don't think it's difficult. They're usually very common words, so as long as you learn Japanese from both listening and reading, this kind of thing comes naturally.

This is the rules of kana orthography in modern Japanese:
http://www.konan-wu.ac.jp/~kikuchi/kanji/dukai.html

The web page shows many examples like 時計 (とけい) (pronounced = とけえ or more phonetically トケー). I guess you already learned the greeting おはよう (Good morning) is pronounced おはよー, but if you didn't, the final よう part is the same as よお (or よう, よぉ, etc.), which means "Hi." (Edit: They're slightly different if you take their pitch patterns into account in actual conversation. But if you ignore intonation and such, they're the same.)

magamo Wrote:The canonical example is 言う (いう), which is pronounced ゆう. The tricky part is that the い -> ゆ change is not the only non-phonetic part. う often means "holding the preceding vowel," and いう (or ゆう) is actually ユー. You'll find more phonetic examples like "まーまー、そーゆーなって (= まあまあ、そういうなって in the proper non-phonetic orthography)" in manga, blogs and the like.

Another example is 東京 (とうきょう). Its pronunciation is トーキョー. So 通 as in 通る (とおる) has exactly the same sound as 東 while usually 通 is written as とお in kana and 東 とう.

There are many other examples like these, but I don't think it's difficult. They're usually very common words, so as long as you learn Japanese from both listening and reading, this kind of thing comes naturally.

This is the rules of kana orthography in modern Japanese:
http://www.konan-wu.ac.jp/~kikuchi/kanji/dukai.html

The web page shows many examples like 時計 (とけい) (pronounced = とけえ or more phonetically トケー). I guess you already learned the greeting おはよう (Good morning) is pronounced おはよー, but if you didn't, the final よう part is the same as よお (or よう, よぉ, etc.), which means "Hi." (Edit: They're slightly different if you take their pitch patterns into account in actual conversation. But if you ignore intonation and such, they're the same.)

I notice this stuff a lot. The readings are slightly altered but are none the less the same. I remember I was trying to transcribe a scene in Japanese and some of the sounds gave me trouble to distinguish from one each other and I know I can understand everything from what I hear. But the slight sounds make it hard to make everything correct.

gfb345 Wrote:Arguably を is a third example (it's pronounced お, but I can't readily come up with an example where this would sound distinctly different from "wo").

Many people pronounce wo slightly different from o.

gfb345 Wrote:I had wondered what ゑ was all about, but I don't recall ever even having seen ゐ before.

By the way of trivia, does any of you happen to know how to type obscure characters like ゑ, ゐ, 々, 乄, ゟ? (I've resorted to cut-and-paste for these.) (I don't know whether these are considered kanji, kana, or something else.)

(I suppose it depends on one's input method. I use the Mac's built-in kotoeri, though checking out Google's IME is in my to-do list, so these two methods are my particular interest.)

I'm able to input 〆 as one of the options kotoeri prodcues for しめ. And I suppose that there's no real need to type 々 by itself, since kotoeri will offer it as part of words whose spelling use it (e.g. ときどき => 時々).

EDIT: FWIW, I found this table that shows the Unicode for some of these rare kana:

http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U3040.pdf

gfb345 Wrote:

gfb345 Wrote:I had wondered what ゑ was all about, but I don't recall ever even having seen ゐ before.

By the way of trivia, does any of you happen to know how to type obscure characters like ゑ, ゐ, 々, 乄, ゟ? (I've resorted to cut-and-paste for these.) (I don't know whether these are considered kanji, kana, or something else.)

(I suppose it depends on one's input method. I use the Mac's built-in kotoeri, though checking out Google's IME is in my to-do list, so these two methods are my particular interest.)

I'm able to input 〆 as one of the options kotoeri prodcues for しめ. And I suppose that there's no real need to type 々 by itself, since kotoeri will offer it as part of words whose spelling use it (e.g. ときどき => 時々).

EDIT: FWIW, I found this table that shows the Unicode for some of these rare kana:

http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U3040.pdf

I think in most input methods you can get ゑ, ヱ, ゐ, and ヰ by typing we or wi and hitting the space key a few times. Actually they're in the w-series in classical Japanese. Probably you can get 々 by kanjifying おなじ. Kanjifying きごう should also gives you obscure kanji, kana and so on.

ん is another example, it's not necessarily "non-phonetic" but it represents several different sounds depending on what comes after it. For instance, in てんいん, both ん's represent a nasalized vowel rather than a consonant "n". In けんぽう, the ん is an "m" sound. In かんげい, the ん combines with the g-consonant to make a nasalized "ng" sound (like "finger" in English). etc.

yudantaiteki Wrote:ん is another example, it's not necessarily "non-phonetic" but it represents several different sounds depending on what comes after it. For instance, in てんいん, both ん's represent a nasalized vowel rather than a consonant "n". In けんぽう, the ん is an "m" sound. In かんげい, the ん combines with the g-consonant to make a nasalized "ng" sound (like "finger" in English). etc.

No. They're allphones of the same phoneme. Certainly they're physically different sounds and can sound as different phonemes to speakers of different languages. But they're the same phoneme to native Japanese speakers. So I think, if a character is representing a single phoneme, it shouldn't be counted as a non-phonetic example in our context.

It's like /p/s in "pin" and "spin" in standard English are physically different sounds but are the same sound to native English speakers. Of course non-native English speakers might see the two /p/s as totally different sounds because they fall into different phoneme categories in their languages. Non-native English speakers might think that /r/s in "ray" and "pray" are completely different the same way as /v/ vs. /f/, i.e., the former is voiced and the latter is unvoiced. But I don't say a phonetic orthography of English (if existed) should differentiate this kind of pair of allophones. There are much more subtle examples (to native English speakers, of course). Besides, there are so-called free allophones, which can appear randomly without following any explicit rules in speech, so technically you can't make a "phonetic orthography" that perfectly handles all allophones.

If grouping all the ん allphones as one sound makes an orthography non-phonetic, you should have multiple characters for pretty much every phoneme. If anything, the Japanese "r" would need tons of letters if you tried to create a crazy orthography like that. Also, the biggest problem is that it'd be the native speakers that have the most trouble mastering such a writing system because their ears can't hear the difference at all in spite of the fact that they can speak perfectly following the rules of allophones.

magamo Wrote:I think in most input methods you can get ゑ, ヱ, ゐ, and ヰ by typing we or wi and hitting the space key a few times.

That's what I tried before I posted, and I can tell you that the Mac's kotoeri does not produce ゑ/ヱ and ゐ/ヰ (though it does immediately produce を/ヲ for wo, even before one hits the space key).

For example, if I do exactly what you said, this is what I get:

magamo Wrote:Probably you can get 々 by kanjifying おなじ. Kanjifying きごう should also gives you obscure kanji, kana and so on.

Your suggestion for おなじ => 々 was right on the money!

The one for きごう did not work, though, but it produced some interesting results. When I try to kanjify this one, I do get a crazy slew of symbols among the options (e.g., ♬ ♨ ♀ ∮ 々 〆), some of which may actually come in handy even when I'm not typing Japanese, but they don't include ゑ/ヱ/ゐ/ヰ.

Then try wyi and wye. Actually I googled for ことえり and ゐ, and I can tell you that the very first result is about how to get them on mac. I just changed my input method to ことえり on OS X 10.5.8 and this wyi/wye thing worked. Also, I'm using ATOK on mac and can get them both ways.

magamo Wrote:Then try wyi and wye.

Thanks!

magamo Wrote:]
No. They're allphones of the same phoneme.

That's why I said it's not really "non-phonetic"; I didn't think many people would be familiar with the terms "allophone" or "phoneme" so I avoided that. I assumed the original poster was not using "phonetic" in the technical linguistic sense because in that case most of the kana are not phonetic.

I just think it's worth pointing out because it's a potential trap for learners; I had some issues with the pronunciation of some words with ん for a few years because I never really paid attention to this. A native speaker of Japanese would never pronounce the ん in 憲法 as a consonantal "n", a native speaker of English may very well do that if he's not fully aware of the issue. You do have to be careful when distinct phonemes in your native languages are allophones of the same phoneme in the target language you're studying.

EDIT: wyi and wye work on some electronic dictionaries also.

yudantaiteki Wrote:

magamo Wrote:]
No. They're allphones of the same phoneme.

That's why I said it's not really "non-phonetic"; I didn't think many people would be familiar with the terms "allophone" or "phoneme" so I avoided that. I assumed the original poster was not using "phonetic" in the technical linguistic sense because in that case most of the kana are not phonetic.

I just think it's worth pointing out because it's a potential trap for learners; I had some issues with the pronunciation of some words with ん for a few years because I never really paid attention to this. A native speaker of Japanese would never pronounce the ん in 憲法 as a consonantal "n", a native speaker of English may very well do that if he's not fully aware of the issue. You do have to be careful when distinct phonemes in your native languages are allophones of the same phoneme in the target language you're studying.

EDIT: wyi and wye work on some electronic dictionaries also.

Then the answer to the OP's question would be "every kana," which I don't think is the kind of answer he wanted. Obviously he didn't mean "phonetic" in a stricter sense. That's why I replied to you by saying ん is not a "non-phonetic kana" by his loose definition.

Also, I haven't said you don't have to be careful about allophones, though to me your post sounded like I implied such a thing.

gfb345 Wrote:some of which may actually come in handy even when I'm not typing Japanese

If someone is interested, you can use these for your to-do lists:

ばつ = ×, ✕, ✗, ✘ or ☒

ちぇっく = ✓, ✔, ☑ or ☒

しかく= ☐, ☑ or ☒

Sebastian Wrote:

gfb345 Wrote:some of which may actually come in handy even when I'm not typing Japanese

If someone is interested, you can use these for your to-do lists:

ばつ = ×, ✕, ✗, ✘ or ☒

ちぇっく = ✓, ✔, ☑ or ☒

しかく= ☐, ☑ or ☒

Very cool. Thanks!