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Japanese words and names sound African (2022)

farooqkperogi.com

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Re: Japanese words and names sound African (2022)

#31

Post by buzer »

> Finnish is a little more flexible, and syllables can end with an n, r, l or t. No consonant clusters, in any of the languages. No syllables ending with consonants outside the restricted set (if any)

What do you mean? There are words like Ahti (Ah), ankerias (as), isku (is) or lapsi (lap) which contain syllables that end in consonants other than n, r, l or t. There are also a lot of words with double consonants (like jarru, lasso, noppa, nurkka) where syllable get split at the middle.

Re: Japanese words and names sound African (2022)

#33

Post by robxorb »

jbs789 wrote: post #29

So do we know why? Apologies if I’ve missed this.

The article seems to say it's random chance, based upon one linguists opinion. Doesn't at all feel right statistically. Seems more likely there would be some kind of missing link. Could someone better informed possibly figure out the odds?

Re: Japanese words and names sound African (2022)

#34

Post by ekianjo »

jameshart wrote: post #17
shiomiru wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nit: pokatokaino is unlikely to be Japanese, since word-initial p has morphed into h during the centuries. But it works if you turn it into, say, t. Anyway, I think there's another factor: the common alphabet we transliterate these languages to is quite limited. I suspect the similarities become less obvious if you use something like the IPA, which has better universal correspondence between sounds and letters (i.e.…

Japanese does allow for word initial P in loan words, like Pokémon, so the sound isn’t impossible in Japanese. And pachinko is a Japanese word.

those are imported words.

Re: Japanese words and names sound African (2022)

#35

Post by arghwhat »

jameshart wrote: post #17
shiomiru wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nit: pokatokaino is unlikely to be Japanese, since word-initial p has morphed into h during the centuries. But it works if you turn it into, say, t. Anyway, I think there's another factor: the common alphabet we transliterate these languages to is quite limited. I suspect the similarities become less obvious if you use something like the IPA, which has better universal correspondence between sounds and letters (i.e.…

Japanese does allow for word initial P in loan words, like Pokémon, so the sound isn’t impossible in Japanese. And pachinko is a Japanese word.

To be fair, Pokémon is abbreviated English, while pachinko is recent from pachin, the onomatopoeia of the loud sound made by the metal balls.

I believe the change into “h” sounds is more applied to words that were traditionally initiated in “p” but morphed over time, in turn also making words starting on “p” an oddity.

Re: Japanese words and names sound African (2022)

#36

Post by trealira »

kagevf wrote: post #16
fjdjshsh wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point. Latin letters map to a big number of IPA sounds. I think this is specially true with consonants. Vowels, however, might be the same. For example, Spanish has five vowels (a, e, i, o, u in IPA). Japanese also has five IPA vowels and only the "u" is different in IPA

I don't know IPA, but Japanese e and Spanish e are also different. Spanish e is like English A in "ace", Japanese e is closer to English "eh".

That's the difference between [e] and [ɛ] in IPA (in IPA, with "narrow" phonetic transcription, you enclose the sounds in brackets). In American English, "ace" is [eɪs] and "mess" is [mɛs]. But I don't think that's right; I'm pretty sure both the Japanese e and Spanish e sound exactly the same.

And if you pronounced [e] and [ɛ] to native speakers of either Spanish or Japanese, they most likely wouldn't be able to differentiate the two sounds consistently without having had training. I know that in Spanish, realization of e can be either vowel depending on the speaker and context; they might pronounce "tierra" as [tjɛra] and "mesa" as [mesa].

Re: Japanese words and names sound African (2022)

#38

Post by ithkuil »

shiomiru wrote: post #11
retrac wrote: post #2

Because the Bantu languages (most prominently: Swahili) and Japanese have similar sound systems. Finnish is also oddly similar-sounding, or Hawaiian. None of them are actually related. It's because the syllable is restricted in the number of possible forms, in a similar way. (And they all have approximately five vowels. And a pitch accent.) In Hawaiian, nothing but consonant + vowel syllables are possible. Swahili an…

Nit: pokatokaino is unlikely to be Japanese, since word-initial p has morphed into h during the centuries. But it works if you turn it into, say, t. Anyway, I think there's another factor: the common alphabet we transliterate these languages to is quite limited. I suspect the similarities become less obvious if you use something like the IPA, which has better universal correspondence between sounds and letters (i.e.…

There are other subtle rules that language may follow in word formation.

For example, in Japanese, a word like tokatokaino may mutate into tokadokaino due to a phonological effect called Rendaku (it depends on details like if "tokadokaino" is a compound word made of "toka"+"toka"+"ino")

Re: Japanese words and names sound African (2022)

#39

Post by semi-extrinsic »

fjdjshsh wrote: post #14
shiomiru wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nit: pokatokaino is unlikely to be Japanese, since word-initial p has morphed into h during the centuries. But it works if you turn it into, say, t. Anyway, I think there's another factor: the common alphabet we transliterate these languages to is quite limited. I suspect the similarities become less obvious if you use something like the IPA, which has better universal correspondence between sounds and letters (i.e.…

That's a good point. Latin letters map to a big number of IPA sounds. I think this is specially true with consonants. Vowels, however, might be the same. For example, Spanish has five vowels (a, e, i, o, u in IPA). Japanese also has five IPA vowels and only the "u" is different in IPA

As a speaker of Scandinavian languages, literally none of the vowels in English map correctly to how we pronounce the same vowels. Several of the English vowels are diphthongs, which we spell out with double vowels. Like eng. "i" is our "ai", eng. "a" is our "ei" - "a bridge" is translated to "ei bro", where the articles are pronounced exactly the same. Or the Scottish word for home, "hame", is pronounced exactly like we say the same word, "heim".

Re: Japanese words and names sound African (2022)

#40

Post by userbinator »

adastra22 wrote: post #21

> People who pay attention to politics are probably familiar with the late Senator Gyang Nyam Shom Pwajok. Names can’t get more Chinese than that! That does not even remotely sound Chinese. Korean, maybe.

Gyang Nyam definitely sounds Korean (thanks to that old meme), but then Shom Pwajok is less discernable -- it's like a hint of Thai or some other southeast Asian language.
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