In romaji, is it okanenakunacchatte?

I think the typical way to romanize it would be okanenakunatchatte, maybe with a space after okane.

I'm having trouble understanding how romanization has anything to do with pronunciation, but I'm pretty sure that JimmySeal is right. I've seen it done with two c's before, but I'm pretty sure that's non-standard.

Thanks.

To Mcjon01. I wrote the romaji because normally, as with ちゃって, there is an extre t sound added to て. But with なっち, i wasn't sure how to pronounce the extra c(or as you guys have pointed out, t).

To me, there's a bit more of a pause in the sound. chya is un-voiced anyway, so there's going to be a stop, but the small tsu seems to extend that pause a tad. Then the chya is done with more emphasis, or plosiveness. Is that more what you were looking for, Mr. Hans?

mr_hans_moleman Wrote:Thanks.

To Mcjon01. I wrote the romaji because normally, as with ちゃって, there is an extre t sound added to て. But with なっち, i wasn't sure how to pronounce the extra c(or as you guys have pointed out, t).

While it's usually romanized as a double consonant, the construct doesn't actually represent a double consonant sound so much as it does a sharp pause in the word. It's hard to explain, but if you listen to a lot of Japanese, you'll hear what I'm talking about.

CharleyGarrett Wrote:chya is un-voiced anyway, so there's going to be a stop, but the small tsu seems to extend that pause a tad.

ちゃ is not "unvoiced".

Japanese is a rhythmic language like Spanish. Spanish people are very good at pronouncing Japanese. Each syllable lasts one beat and the small tsu, which indicates silence, also lasts one beat. You can clap your hands in rhythm and say each syllable in turn. Like this:

o,ka,ne,na,ku,na,(pause),cha,(pause),te

Each time you clap your hands, you should say each syllable between each comma. For the pauses, you should clap your hands without saying anything. After you've done it slowly, speed it up about 10 times and that's how it should be pronounced.

The reason a double consonant is used for small tsu is because the sound it represents also occurs in English sentences where the same consonant is repeated. For example, "Hot tea". When you say, "Hot tea", you don't pronounce the "t" twice, you have a short pause and you pronounce it only once.

Although you will read ホット・ティー on menus, if you were to convert "Hot tea" into katakana in such a way that it represents as closely as possible the English pronunciation, then you would in fact write

ホッティー

Hope that makes sense.

wrightak Wrote:ちゃ is not "unvoiced".

Yes it is. The vocal cords don't vibrate until you get to the /a/. A voiced 'ch' (tʃ) sounds like an English J (dʃ). But that doesn't really have anything to do with what you explained later.

wrightak Wrote:The reason a double consonant is used for small tsu is because the sound it represents also occurs in English sentences where the same consonant is repeated. For example, "Hot tea". When you say, "Hot tea", you don't pronounce the "t" twice, you have a short pause and you pronounce it only once.

It isn't that the small tsu represents a pause. It only seems like it does because the pause is the only way to double the length of a plosive consonant. For doubled consonants that aren't plosives (like 'ss' and 'ssh') the small tsu is still used, but there is no pause, just a double-length sound.

Italian and Hungarian are two languages that do it the same, only it's easier for us to see the doubleness because they use the Latin alphabet.

MethodGT Wrote:

wrightak Wrote:ちゃ is not "unvoiced".

Yes it is. The vocal cords don't vibrate until you get to the /a/. A voiced 'ch' (tʃ) sounds like an English J (dʃ).

My apologies. I misunderstood the terminology.

MethodGT Wrote:For doubled consonants that aren't plosives (like 'ss' and 'ssh') the small tsu is still used, but there is no pause, just a double-length sound.

So am I correct in saying that for the word 雑誌　ざっし　zasshi, you don't think there's a pause? I always thought there was. I'll listen out today.

I've always noticed it more of a roll than a pause. Like they clearly are saying the "s" part like there are two of them (in 雑誌 that is).

I suspect the concept of "pause" is simply an attempt to give a clear rule of pronunciation, since the English language (as other similar ones) is lacking one. There is no real difference between that and the "double consonant".
I'm thinking this because my native language, Italian, is full of double consonants, and the concept of pause is not used at all. Furthermore, the sound of "our" double consonants is identical to the sound given by the Japanese small つ.
I was aware that English speakers have difficuilty in pronouncing this kind of sound, because it's not really used in their language.

To give an example, the name "Condoleezza", besides being a misspelling of "Con dolcezza" (with sweetness), is usually pronounced "Con-doh-lee-za" (I don't know if I've written it correctly, but you know), while the Italian double z should be pronounced as a real double consonant. How can I explain it? Oh yes! Use something like a pause between "lee" and "za" .
(also the "ee" would be pronounced like an "eh" of double lenght, but that's beyond the point)

hmmm, I hadn't thought of the Italian double z. From the little I've studied, I think I remember that the 'z' is pronounced like a 'ts', right? If so, it would back my theory that it only sounds like a pause because that's the only way to double the length of a plosive (the 't'). If not, then I am wrong (at least about the zz).

I'm pretty sure the Italian double n in anno (year) has the same length as the double n in 女　おんあ　'onna', which would seem to back my theory (what's interesting here is that it's a doubled consonant, but since japanese has the sylabic n ん, there is no need for the small つ). Could you give some examples of an Italian ss (I would ask for a double sh, but Italian doesn't have that sound as far as I know).

thanks for all your help, i got it now

In Italian, the z can be pronounced both like a "ts" and like a "ds", depending on the words. But when it is doubled it's always "ts", so it doesn't contrast with your theory. Of course they've never taught us to use pauses when doubling a letter, kids learn that kind of things just from hearing them spoken by adults. I guess you could see it that way too, though.

With the double s (and f and l and others) there is no real pause in the sound. The s sound is just longer. Examples:
Rosso (red)
Massa (mass)
The s is hissed and longer than a single s.
Italian actually has the "sh" sound. It's written "sc" but it sounds slightly different from the Japanese one. Perhaps it's more similar to the English one. An interesting note is that when it's in the middle of a word its sound is always somewhat "doubled" or prolonged.

The good thing for Italian speakers (and those of other languages with similar pronunciation rules) trying to speak Japanese is that they can express almost all the Japanese sounds in a very straightforward way, without all the ambiguities of English. く is pronounced "ku" (written "cu") whatever its position in the word and the following and preceding letters are. In English one would have to specify that it's spoken as a "koo" and not as in "kurdish".

I think a hard part of Japanese pronunciation is knowing when to devoice the vowels, like the u at the end of desu, and the i in shita. Sometimes it seems like they are devoiced, and sometimes they aren't. Is it random? I've read that it happens when an i or u is found between two unvoiced consonants. But it seems that it isn't always the case.

Also, when is the second word in a group voiced? Like gana in 'hiragana', and jima in 'Iwo Jima'? Why isn't it voiced in 'katakana'? Are there any hard rules for that?

MethodGT Wrote:Also, when is the second word in a group voiced? Like gana in 'hiragana', and jima in 'Iwo Jima'? Why isn't it voiced in 'katakana'? Are there any hard rules for that?

It's called rendaku. That wikipedia article has some useful links in the references section, including a page of academic papers about it. Rough summary: some of it is rule-based (ie native speakers unconsciously apply it automatically when creating compound words, and there are certain exceptions based on the particular consonants before and after, and so on); but some of it is purely lexical, ie 'this compound has/doesn't have rendaku just because', and native speakers just have that as a special case for that particular word.

One of the papers mentions 'hiragana' vs 'katakana' but doesn't give any particular conclusion. My vote is for 'accident of history'.

Oh, the page-of-papers I linked to also has some stuff about devoicing vowels. The 'corpus based analysis of vowel devoicing' paper describes it as "an event whose occurrence cannot be predicted with 100% accuracy"...

I once heard a Japanese woman talking on the phone (in a semi-formal context, to a travel agent or something) with a rather odd speech manner which involved not devoicing the 'u' in desu and masu. So some of it is stylistic, I guess.

Getting back to the pronunciation of nattchata, these pauses get bigger the more emphatic the speaker is being. I'm not saying this as a rule that I've read about, or any sort of a scholarly study. Its just the way I've heard native speakers talk for years. It may or may not be like Italian (I wouldn't know anything about Italian native speakers). But there is definitely a break or a pause, that gets bigger the more emotional the speaker is about it.