81–90 of 115 posts
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…
Just curious: what path lead you to know this stuff?
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…
- agglutinative syntax (i.e. combining long sequences of words and suffixes to form complex meanings) - vowel harmony (seems to exist in the earliest attested forms of Old Japanese, but not anymore) - palatalization before front vowels (i, e) - further simplification of the vowel system
My only nitpick is that Bantu languages are not relevant here. The author is explicitly focusing on Nigerian languages (although he titled that "Japanese words and name sound African"... Africa is a big continent with just as much language diversity as Asia, if not more). While there are some Bantu languages in Nigeria, they aren't as prominent there as they are in East, Central and South Africa. The author mentions Yoruba, Igbo, Fula, Hausa, Edo and several others - none of them is a Bantu language, although some are related. Even though you can put all of the languages above (except for Hausa) into the hypothetical Niger-Congo macro-family, together with the Bantu languages, they are quite far away by this point.
The other issue is that Bantu languages are probably not the best example for "Japanese-sounding" languages. They feature very frequent use of prenasalized consonants. While prenasalization almost certainly existed in Old Japanese[2] and is still retained in some northeastern dialects, this is not something people would identify with "Japanese-sounding" nowadays. Not to mention southern Bantu languages like Zulu and Xhosa that feature heavy usage of click consonants - these are completely alien to Japanese phonology.
But this doesn't detract at all from your argument. Languages with similar structure, will often sound similar. I think the other anecdote the author mentions (Plateau State languages sounding Sino-Tiban) also checks out. I am not familiar with any of these languages, but it seems many of them are tonal and based around heavy use of complex monosyllabic morphemes with complex combinations of initial consonant + medial glides(?) + diphthongs + final consonants. This is exactly what so strongly distinguishes the phonology and phonotactics of Sino-Tibetan languages.
> 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.
> Shok Jok. That name could pass for a Mandarin or Cantonese name. These sounds do not exist in Mandarin. This would never be, or sound like, a Mandarin name. And no mention is made of tones, which are critical in Mandarin. The article already smelled of a bovid's feces, but at this point I actually saw the bullshit.
I still don't think "Shok Jok" sounds very much Chinese (It mostly sounds American English[1] to me), but YMMV.
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
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 lik…
English does not do this; every word has its own pronunciation, only loosely related to how it is spelled. I think every native English speaker has had the experience of learning a word from reading it, and subsequently mis-pronouncing it because we had to guess at the pronunciation. E.g. I suffered acute embarrassment from mis-pronouncing "Hermione" when talking to a friend about the Potter books. I grew up in the UK but had never met the name before and my guess at pronunciation was entirely reasonable but entirely wrong.
Though I lived for a while in Ireland, and they have it worse. My friend Mebd laughed at me a lot.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 dif…
Japanese e would only ever be [ɛ]. The constructs to produce an [e] sound would be transliterated as "ei" (the quoted are just letters, not meant to be IPA). So, while I disagree that they sound "exactly the same", I do agree that in most cases the differences between [e] and [ɛ] wouldn't be enough to cause confusion between speakers of either language.
What's your source for this? Wikipedia says "/e, o/ are mid [e̞, o̞]" [1]
>The mid front unrounded vowel is a type of vowel sound that is used in some spoken languages. There is no dedicated symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the exact mid front unrounded vowel between close-mid [e] and open-mid [ɛ], but it is normally written ⟨e⟩.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology?wprov=sfla1
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…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
For a sound to occur in a language, there are two requirements:
The obvious one is that it has to be possible.
But the less-obvious one is that its precursor in the ancestral language must have been possible there. This is what causes strange gaps where it looks like a sound should be possible, and yet it never occurs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 lik…
When learning German it was a revelation that languages could pronounce the same letters in the same way in every word, and therefore you could accurately predict the pronunciation of a word from the spelling. English does not do this; every word has its own pronunciation, only loosely related to how it is spelled. I think every native English speaker has had the experience of learning a word from reading it, and sub…
> 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.