wa1.4. Voicing
In the throat there are two pieces of muscular tissue that can be vibrated with a flow of air from the lungs like a couple of heavy rubber bands. They are called vocal cords. When vocal cords vibrate, we say the sound has VOICING or is VOICED. When these cords are somewhat relaxed at the sides of the throat, we say the sound is VOICELESS or UNVOICED. You can feel the vibration of the vocal cords by placing your hand on your throat. Or put your hands over your ears and you will notice a buzz whenever a sound is voiced.
In most languages, some of the sounds are typically voiced and others are typically voiceless. For instance, in English the initial sounds of these pairs differ in that the ones on the left (k, ch, t, s, p, f, th) are voiceless, and those on the right (g, j, d, z, b, v, th) are voiced:
| Voiceless | Voiced |
| Kay | gay |
| cheer | jeer |
| toe | dough |
| seal | zeal |
| pay | bay |
| fan | van |
| thin | then |
There are similar pairs of voiced and voiceless sounds in Japanese:
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| [cue 01-4] |
| Voiceless | Voiced |
| 金 kin gold | 銀 gin silver |
| 血 chi blood | 字 ji graphic character, letter |
| 十 tō ten | どう dō how |
| そう sō so, right | 象 zō elephant |
| パン pan bread | 番 ban guard, watchman |
In English, the sounds we call VOWELS, those made without any close contact between the tongue and top of the mouth, are always voiced, unless we are softly whispering. In Japanese, vowel sounds are often unvoiced when they come between voiceless consonants. Virtually every speaker of Japanese pronounces the vowels written i and u as unvoiced between voiceless consonants, and some drop these vowels completely. At the end of a word and after a voiceless consonant, these vowels are also frequently unvoiced or dropped, so that the final syllable of ohayō gozaimasu ‘good morning’ and genki desu ‘I’m fine’ sound AS IF there were no u there at all. The other vowels, those we write a, e, and o, are usually pronounced voiced. But unaccented ka and ko at the beginning of a word are often unvoiced when followed by the same syllable: kakanai ‘does not write,’ koko ‘here.’ And ha and ho are often unvoiced when followed by a voiceless consonant and the same vowel: haka ‘grave,’ hokori ‘dust,’ and hosoi ‘slender.’
1.5. Vowels
There is a striking difference between the way a Japanese person pronounces his vowels and the way an American pronounces his. Japanese vowels seem to stand still. English vowels often slide off from their starting points in one of three directions: with the tongue moving front and up (as in key, bay, shy, and toy); with the tongue moving back and up and the lips rounding (as in now, know, and who); with the tongue relaxing toward a central position (as in yeah, ah, law, uh, and huh; with many speakers also in bad, bed, bid, and bud; with some Southern and Western speakers also in bat, bet, bit, and butt).
A vowel takes its characteristic color from the way the tongue, mouth, and lips are held. Vowels are often described in terms of the tongue’s position in three top-to-bottom levels (HIGH, MID, LOW) and three front-to-back positions (FRONT, CENTRAL, BACK). If we ignore the off-glides mentioned above, and think only about the points of departure, we can illustrate these positions for American vowels with such words as these:
Note: Some speakers do not distinguish caught from cot.
For many American speakers all nine possible positions are used. The Japanese speaker, however, fills only five of the spaces as in the following words:
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| [cue 01-5] |
In English, we spell the same vowel sound many different ways (dough, toe, slow, so, sew, etc.) and the same letter may indicate a number of different vowels (line, marine, inn, shirt, etc.). In Romanized Japanese, the same symbol is normally used for each occurrence of the same vowel. You should learn these symbols and the sounds they stand for, and not confuse this simple use of these letters with their many English uses. The use of the letters may be remembered as: i as in ski, e as in pet, a as in father, o as in so, u as in rhubarb. In both English and Japanese, the lips are relaxed for vowels in the front and center of the mouth, and somewhat rounded for those in the back. Many Japanese round their lips very little, however, and you will probably notice that the Japanese u involves less of this lip-rounding than the American equivalent. (Actually, much of the American lip-rounding is part of the off-glide.) After the consonants s, ts, and z, the Japanese u is sometimes pronounced in a HIGH CENTRAL position.
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| [cue 01-6] |
| 進む susumu | advances |
| 車 kuruma | car |
| 靴 kutsu | shoes |
| 続く tsuzuku | continues |
| 盗む nusumu | steals, swipes |
| 牛乳 gyūnyū | milk |
In ordinary conversation when the Japanese syllable u comes before ma, me, or mo, it is often pronounced as if it were the syllable m:
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| [cue 01-7] |
| 馬 uma [mma] | horse |
| 梅 ume [mme] | plum |
| 埋もれ木 umoregi [mmoregi] | fossil wood |
Notice that Japanese does not utilize the MID CENTRAL position on the vowel chart. This is one of the most common of English vowels; it is sometimes indicated by the phonetic symbol ə (the schwa or ‘inverted e’). For many English speakers, this is the most common vowel in weak-stressed syllables; so
