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PRONUNCIATON

In this dictionary, because we are dealing with the spoken language, the words are given in romanized form, based on the Hepburn romanization, which is traditionally favored by foreigners, with a few additional marks to help with the pronunciation. If at first the marks bother you, just disregard them; later you will probably find the notations useful as a reminder of what you have heard.

Japanese phrases are accompanied by little tunes that help the hearer know what words a phrase contains. The tunes consist of a limited number of patterns of higher and lower pitch; each phrase has an inherent pattern. For example, the following common tune is rather monotonous: the pitch is slightly lower on the first syllable, then rises and stays on a plateau for the rest of the word or phrase:

kono kodomo wa nakanai	‘this child does not cry’
この 子ども は 泣かない
Yokohama e iku	‘goes to Yokohama’
横浜 へ 行く

A less common tune starts high and immediately falls, staying down till the end:

^áme desu 雨 です ‘it’s rain’

^Méguro e mo iku 目黒 へ も 行く ‘goes to Meguro too’

Other tunes rise to a plateau and then fall at some point before the end:

A^kásaka 赤坂 ‘Akasaka’

I^kebúkuro 池袋 ‘Ikebukuro’

ya^sumimáshita 休みました ‘rested’

When the accent, i.e., a fall of pitch, is on the last syllable, you sometimes cannot hear it unless another word, such as a particle, is attached:

ha^{na (ga akai)} 鼻(が 赤い) ‘the nose (is red)’

ha^{á (ga akai)} 花(が 赤い) ‘the flower (is red)’

When the change of pitch is within a long syllable, you will probably notice a rise or fall within the syllable, as shown by these place names:

Ōsaka 大阪	= oosaka	Kyōto 京都	= kyóoto
Ryūkū 琉球	= ryuukyúu	Taitō-ku 台東区	= taitóoku

When a word has more than one accent mark that means the word has variant forms. Some people may say it with the fall at one of the syllables, others at a different syllable. When an accent mark appears in parentheses, the word is often phrased with the preceding word, which carries an accent. That accounts for the difference between hírō shimásu [披露します] ‘performs, announces, etc.’ and riyō shimásu [利用します] ‘presumes, uses, etc.’. The accent of a particular word, especially a verb form, may change in certain contexts, as explained in the grammars; the changes often involve an accent acquired or lost on the last syllable of the form. A compound word has an inherent tune that follows rules somewhat independent of those of the component elements.

Japanese speakers often reduce the short vowels i and u in certain words by devoicing (whispering) them or even suppressing them completely. The vowel reductions are a surface phenomenon, a kind of last-minute touch when you are about to speak your sentence, and they are ignored by the traditional writing system and most transcriptions. But there are many subtleties to the rules that call for i and u instead of i or u, and they often involve word boundaries and other grammatical factors. It isn’t just a matter of “whisper i and u when used between voiceless consonants (p, t, k, f, s, h),” though that is a good rule. You can have more than one whispered vowel in a word (kikimáshita [聞きました] ‘I heard it’) but not in successive syllables (kikitai [聞きたい] ‘I want to hear it’). Usually it is the first of two susceptible syllables that are whispered, but not always. Syllables beginning with (p, t, k) are more resistant than those that begin with the affricates (ch and ts). And, syllables beginning with these affricates are more resistant than syllables that begin with fricatives (f, h, s, sh), in rekishi-ka [歴史家] ‘historian’ (from rekishi [歴史] ‘history’). In the foregoing fricatives, it is the second of the susceptible syllables that is whispered.

Another general rule is that i and u are unvoiced at the end of a word that has an inherent accent when that word ends a phrase or sentence. That is why we write all the polite non-past forms as …másu [… ます].

The vowel will remain voiceless before a voiceless consonant (dekimásu ka [できますか] ‘Can you do it?’) but usually will get voiced before a voiced consonant (dekimásu ga [できますが] ‘I can, but’). For nouns, however, and for verb forms other than …másu [… ます], we have not marked as voiceless such cases of final ...i and ...u, because so often they are followed by particles or other elements that begin with a voiced consonant. For example, by itself gásu [ガス] ‘gas’ is pronounced gásu (and dásu [出す] ‘puts it out’ is pronounced dásu) but the second syllable will be voiced in the more common phrases that you hear, such as gásu o tsukéte kudasai [ガスをつけて下さい] ‘turn on the gas.’

When shimásu [します] ‘does’ is attached to a noun that ends in a reducible syllable, we write the voiceless vowel: insatsu [印刷] ‘printing’ that becomes insatsu shimásu [印刷します] ‘prints it’. (This dictionary does not always call your attention to regular situations that will bring back the voicing, as in insatsu shite [印刷して] ‘printing it’.) At the beginning of a word (kusá [草] ‘grass’) or in the middle (enpitsu [え んぴつ] ‘pencil’), an unvoiced vowel remains unvoiced except when the syllables are recited, sounded out, or sung.

The first letter represents a nasal syllable that takes its color from the sounds around it, so that when positioned before a sound made with the lips (m, b, p) it sounds like a long m. Before f, however, and in all other situations, when the syllable contains the letter n, then that ‘pamphlet’ is pronounced pánfurétto [パンフレット].

Many Japanese pronounced fu as hu. The syllable hi is often spoken as a palatal fricative (like German ich), and you may notice that quite a few speakers make it sound just like shi, especially when the i is devoiced; if your ears hear shito, be aware that it is very likely just a variant of hito [人] ‘person.’ The lips are not much rounded for the Japanese vowel u and are totally disengaged in the syllables su and tsu, for which the tongue is moved quite far forward, so that the u sound is somewhere between i and u.

We have not shown the distinction between the two kinds of g that are used by many speakers because the present-day situation is in flux and the distinction, which carries little semantic weight, is missing in many parts of the country. The prestige pronunciation, however, favors a “softened” form of ...g... when it is felt to be internal to a word, or begins a particle, as in ... ga [… が] . The softened form is pronounced through the nose, like the ng at the end of English ‘sing.’ Some speakers use a murmured version of ...g..., a voiced fricative, instead of the nasal.

The long vowels ō and ū are written with a macron in virtually all cases, though they are functionally equivalent to double vowels, oo and uu and are often so transcribed. The long vowels ā and ē are similar, but except in foreignisms, most cases of long ē are written as ei, following the practice of the hiragana orthography, which takes into account the fact that in some areas people pronounce ei as a diphthong, as once was true everywhere.

The long vowels are written in katakana with a bar (a dash) after the syllable; in hiragana they are written as double vowels oo, uu, ii, ee, aa, but for historical reasons most often the long ō is written ou. That is why when you use romanization to type your input for a Japanese word processor you have to write ho u ho u to produce the hiragana string that can be converted into the kanji deemed appropriate for the word hōhō [方法] ‘method.’ (But you input Ōsaka [大阪] as o o sa ka because the first element of that name, the ō of ōkíi [大きい] ‘big,’ happens to be one of the handful of common exceptions.) We write the word for ‘beer’ as bíiru [ビール] instead of putting a long mark over a single i both for esthetic reasons and for linguistic considerations: most cases of long i consist of two grammatically different elements, as in the many adjectives that end in …i-i or, less obviously, such nouns as chíi [地位] ‘position.’