Haych
Member
From: Canada
Registered: 2008-09-28
Posts: 168
Ive been noticing that japanese people tend to pronounce g's such as in が as [ŋ] instead of [g]. I want to know if this is standard pronunciation or is it just a lazy habit.
Japanese wikipedia has this listed for 「日本語」 IPA: [nʲiɦoŋŋo] ([nʲippoŋŋo]) which sort of bugs me because its not even possible. Its like pronouncing 連絡 with the [ɽ]'s intact.
So anyways, to those of you who have more experience with native speakers, can I keep saying it as [g] or will I get funny looks?
Ryuujin27
Member
Registered: 2006-12-14
Posts: 824
Don't worry about this too much. Here's the real difference:
Both are completely accepted. However, if you would like your Japanese to be more respected with the older crowd and if you want your Japanese to carry a sort of regal elegance, pronounce the g like [ŋ].
This has been explained to me in great depth a number of time by various Japanese people. While all of them agree that it is a kind of... "high-class" way to pronounce the g, some thing that it is good it is dying out amount the younger crowd as it sounds rather stuffy. While others, such as the case with my friend and her mom, think it is the high of tragedy that this pronunciation is dying and have attempted to get me to start using it (at which I usually fail).
It really has nothing to do with appropriate words to use it in, or any correlation to news casting (though they do use it).
P.S. - It should be important to note that caivano is correct in saying that if the first consonant is g then it is never pronounced like [ŋ], or I should say at least in the extended conversations I have with people who use this pronunciation regularly, I've never heard it used in the beginning of a word. Though I'd also like to note it isn't extremely common to hear used outside of the が particle (in which the not at the beginning rule is, I guess, broken).
Ryuujin27
Member
Registered: 2006-12-14
Posts: 824
While I 101% disagree with that notion, as I'm sure most Japanese linguists will agree, I'll go ahead and say sure, that could be one way of looking at it. But instead of just making a semi-rude statement, let me tell you why I disagree. Basically, I disagree from what I learned in my study of Classical Japanese which, if anything, has taught me that not only are particles separate words, but so are verb endings as common as ます. To further change the way you think of Japanese, consider that the stem of say... 行く is definitely not 行き, it's 行.
Could that thinking come from the practice of romanizing Japanese and having particles appear in that fashion?
JimmySeal
Member
From: Kyoto
Registered: 2006-03-28
Posts: 2279
Ryuujin27 wrote:
Could that thinking come from the practice of romanizing Japanese and having particles appear in that fashion?
It's not just romanized Japanese. Storybooks for small children will have the text split up into small chunks, basically individual words grouped with any particles or verb endings that belong to them.
I also base this off of the phonetic behavior of が, and also that of は and へ. If you've studied Classical Japanese, you'd know that the kana は and へ are never pronounced "wa" or "e" at the beginning of a word, except in the case of particles. A little fishy if they're independent words, no?
taught me that not only are particles separate words, but so are verb endings as common as ます.
Are they separate words? Can you use them by themselves? -masu is a helping verb and therefore not an inseparable part of verbs, but it's still a suffix. Would you say that the -ness in listlessness, or the un- in unstoppable are separate words because they can be separated away from the word stems?
the stem of say... 行く is definitely not 行き, it's 行.
Not sure what you mean by stem here. 行き in its entirety is one of the six conjugations of the verb. You might say in a linguistic sense that the ik/ part of iku is a stem because the part after that is inflected, but that has nothing to do with what's a word and what's not.
Ryuujin27
Member
Registered: 2006-12-14
Posts: 824
I guess separate word was the wrong... well, word to use. It's true they can't be used by themselves (well, unless you want to count 益々, but let's not get down to technicalities). I guess I meant a separate entity. As you see in Classical, one can combine a number of different endings to a verb which in turn will attach to different conjugations of other endings. As such, one could say that since all these endings conjugate just like verbs do (in the 未然、連体、etc), that they are certainly separate entities in and of themselves, even if they can't be considered words.
Now, while particles don't conjugate in the same fashion, or at all, they still shouldn't be thought of as attached to the subsumed word. If this were the case then they should appear at all times in a specific situation, which as we all know never happens. Particles can be dropped, but the rest of the word cannot.
While you are right that in books for small children they will often separate words in that manner, it is more for the general legibility of the text as opposed to showing something about the structure of the language. We can blame this on little kids not being able to pick up kanji quickly enough, the slackers.
But we've deviated off the main topic by a great deal now, so I guess we should either continue this in another thread, or just agree to disagree.
P.S. - The... well for lack of a better term that I know "~ます stem" is often used to show how to conjugate when teaching Japanese to foreigners, and thus it is largely thought of as the stem of a verb. I was just commenting that it isn't.
JimmySeal
Member
From: Kyoto
Registered: 2006-03-28
Posts: 2279
Ryuujin27 wrote:
Now, while particles don't conjugate in the same fashion, or at all, they still shouldn't be thought of as attached to the subsumed word. If this were the case then they should appear at all times in a specific situation, which as we all know never happens. Particles can be dropped, but the rest of the word cannot.
I really don't know what you're trying to say here. Words are abbreviated all the time in all sorts of languages. That doesn't mean that the abbreviated part isn't part of the word.
Japanese orthography and terminology leave a lot of room for interpretation about what constitutes a single word and I doubt that even most Japanese are in concordance about the matter.
And there may be reasons for describing the division one way in one context, and another way in another context. That's why I used the phrase "From one way of looking at it" in my earlier post.
In the context of phonetics, there's great evidence to support the idea that word+particle combine into a single unit (perhaps I was amiss in using the word "word," as that's a bit of a vague term anyway). Not only are が, は, and へ all pronounced as though they are part of the word to which they are attached, it's also the case that case particles take on and extend the pitch accent of the words to which they attach, rather than having their own accent. This isn't the case for word combinations like adj.+noun, verb+noun, adv.+verb, etc.
[Bringing it all back to the main topic]
So however you want to attach arbitrary terminology to various things, I think we have some good reason to see why the が particle is often pronounced ŋa, and is not an exception to any rule.
liosama
Member
From: sydney
Registered: 2008-03-02
Posts: 896
Haych wrote:
Ive been noticing that japanese people tend to pronounce g's such as in が as [ŋ] instead of [g]. I want to know if this is standard pronunciation or is it just a lazy habit.
Japanese wikipedia has this listed for 「日本語」 IPA: [nʲiɦoŋŋo] ([nʲippoŋŋo]) which sort of bugs me because its not even possible. Its like pronouncing 連絡 with the [ɽ]'s intact.
So anyways, to those of you who have more experience with native speakers, can I keep saying it as [g] or will I get funny looks?
Wiki ain't the be all and end all for correct phonetic transcription. But why cant you just get proper audio and listen to that? IPA is what linguists use. Most of my teachers and Japanese people I've spoken to have your [ŋ]. The first and most obvious was in ですが where its clearly a [ŋ] not a [g] which sounds very begginerish to my (begginer) ears.
I feel that if you pronounce ですが as [desuga] then you are emphasisng each syllable too strongly and too slowly. You can't possible say [desuga] with speed, I know I cant, I find that it costs me least energy nasalize the preceding vowel /u/ which allows an easier transition into the [ŋ] (from /g/) so over time it will coalesce to a [desu~ŋa] (i'm just copy pasting IPA symbols here but assume I'm using the correct /u/ ).
But anyway in short you're going overkill with the IPA methinks, just keep listening to actual audio, record your voice make sure you're pronouncing shit clearly. I'm still not convinced IPA will help with your pronunciation, I still see it as a purely scientific tool for 'quick and easy' reading of some unheard of language X_Kadkak3.2! spoken by 50 people out in Kalapulu, and not as a way to aid pronunciation.
Though I'd be more than glad to be convinced otherwise. I went down that path once ya know. As a matter of fact I SRS'ed every single phonetic component of Japanese, hoping it would make me the master pronouncer, I had about 4000 cards in total, mastered every single frequency component that I deconstructed with my nifty matlab program, I got samples of the formant frequencies of at least 50 Japanese heterosexual (handsome, non nerdy [so as to suite my own life]) males, averaged them and took the best estimate.
If you want my filter bank analyzer matlab code which takes in 50 mp3 samples of audio, and outputs all possible phonetic syllables, please pm.
