sethg wrote:

Anyone else think the pronunciation of these two words is kinda crazy? Anybody wanna take a stab at explaining why or is it just the way it is because it is the way it is?

Maybe it has something to do with the mysterious 囲 kanji?

P.S. If you don't know what I'm talking about, check WWWJDIC's pronunciation flash clips.

I checked out the clips, and I heard nothing that sounded out of the ordinary. I guessed the pronunciation correctly just from the hiragana.

There's nothing particularly strange about the way 範囲 is pronounced, but you are right about 雰囲気. When pronouncing 雰囲気 you need to say it more like ふいんき... kind of swallow that second syllable.

sethg wrote:

Maybe I'm hearing it wrong, but it sounds to me like the い and the ん switch places in both words almost. Does no one else hear that?

範囲 and 雰囲気 both use the version of "ん" I mentioned above, i.e. where air passes through both nose and mouth at the same time. As we don't use this sound in English, it may be difficult to recognize it.

In English we stop the passage of air in the mouth to make an "n", so I wonder if you are interpreting the points where the air stops in those two words as a slight "n" sound. I.e. in 範囲 the sound stops after the "i" because it's the end of the word, and in 雰囲気 the sound is stopped after the "i" by the following "k".

Also, have a listen to another native saying "範囲" here. (From the Saiga Kanji Dictionary). This speaker pronounces the "ん" more clearly.

Don't overthink it. Those words seem pretty straightforward to me.

Just be careful with 雰囲気, according to japanesepod101, it's not uncommon for some natives to pronounce it ふいんき but that's actually a mistake.

Codexus wrote:

Don't overthink it. Those words seem pretty straightforward to me.

Just be careful with 雰囲気, according to japanesepod101, it's not uncommon for some natives to pronounce it ふいんき but that's actually a mistake.

Don't think of it as a mistake. Think of it as how it is actually suppose to be pronounced.

For example, when I learned the word on paper a while ago, I used it saying it how it was written. One of my Japanese friends immediately corrected me, saying that while it is written that way no one actually says that.

Wikipedia says about ん:

[Ṽ] (a nasalized vowel) before vowels, approximants (/j/ and /w/), and fricatives (/s/, /z/, and /h/). Also found utterance-finally.

It's not exactly specific about which vowel is nasalized, but it seems to generally nasalise the previous vowel, so the /a/ in 範囲 is actually /ã/.

Last edited by JimmySeal (2009 December 25, 2:56 am)

Codexus wrote:

In this case, I think the correct version is still more common anyway.

I disagree on this point.  Seems to me that Japanese people pronounce 雰囲気 as either ふいんき or ふんいんき about 95% of the time.

Codexus wrote:

Ryuujin27 wrote:

Don't think of it as a mistake. Think of it as how it is actually suppose to be pronounced.

I don't think that's true. Just because a mistake is common doesn't make it necessarily correct, even though at some point that might happen (あらた→あたらしい).

In this case, I think the correct version is still more common anyway.

Trust me here, the most common way is ふいんき. It's everywhere. In any media that has the word it is said that way. Any time someone says it in conversation in Japan they say it that way. That's the way to say it.

Katsuo wrote:

Regarding the pronunciation of 雰囲気, here's what the "Kotoba Ojisan" had to say in 2005.

So then you should be saying it ふいんき.

Actually, 円 was written ゑん before the kana reforms, so yen (or wen) was the correct romanization, and to some extent having a bit of a y sound in there is the correct pronunciation (historically). Same thing for ゑびす beer (Yebisu) and ゑど (Yedo, now Tokyo).

雰囲気 was written ふんゐき (funwiki/funyiki), but that doesn't cause the problem here. The strange pronunciation is caused by 音便, or changes made for the ease of pronunciation. Another prominent example is て form. Ex. 泳いで (swim) is more correctly written 泳ぎて, and 書いて (write) is more correctly 書きて. The reason the writing matches the pronunciation now is that the 音便 happened before the Meiji/postWW2 writing reforms. 雰囲気's change is more recent, so it isn't reflected in writing (yet). Don't think of 音便 as a mistake (unless you think て form is wrong too), just think of it as the evolution of language.

Remember that kana isn't a phonetic writing system, even though pronunciation and writing USUALLY line up. Sometimes the かな and the reading just won't match.

Last edited by Jarvik7 (2009 December 26, 9:41 pm)

Jarvik7 wrote:

Actually, 円 was written ゑん before the kana reforms, so yen (or wen) was the correct romanization, and to some extent having a bit of a y sound in there is the correct pronunciation (historically). Same thing for ゑびす beer (Yebisu) and ゑど (Yedo, now Tokyo).

Well...maybe.  There's no clear consensus on exactly when ゑ lost its "w".

. Another prominent example is て form. Ex. 泳いで (swim) is more correctly written 泳ぎて, and 書いて (write) is more correctly 書きて.

In modern Japanese, 書きて and 泳ぎて are wrong even in writing.  I'm not sure that 書きて was ever actually *pronounced* かいて, it was just used in writing that was still being written essentially in classical Japanese.  The k-onbin is pretty old, even in Genji you see うつくしうて instead of うつくしくて.