Hi all
I am starting the basic Japanese course. I have a question about the language such as "why does the alphabet have a symbol for the phonetic sound “r” but it can also be “L”?
Also, why do Japanese speakers add the sound “o” to the end of an English word when there is no “o”?
How is the best way to ask questions such as these?
Thanks
Sharyn
This happens because the Japanese “r” can have different pronunciation depending on the speaker, the most common ones are:
[ɾ] (like the Spanish “R” as in “tres”, or the American English “d” as in “medal”).
[l] (Like the English “L” as in “light”).
[r] (like the Spanish “R” as in “carro”) usually seen as vulgar, you can see it being used quite frequently by deliquents in anime.
[ɺ] (it’s basically a [ɾ] pronounced with the tongue in the position you would put it if you were to pronounce [l]) since this sound is like a mix of the sounds of “R” and “L”, some people not aware of its existence may understand it as a kind of “R” while others may understand it as an “L”.
These different pronunciations, especially the last one, are the reason why some people may write the Japanese “R” sounds either as R or L when using English letters.
Japanese phonotactics does not allow a word to end with a consonant (that’s supposedly the rule, but there are exceptions, I won’t get in much detail here, since you may learn it as you study), that’s why any English word that ends with a consonant gets a vowel at the end when pronuncing it in Japanese, the vowel is usually “o” or “u”.