Final glottal stop in Japanese

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Pole, the
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Final glottal stop in Japanese

Post by Pole, the »

http://www.tofugu.com/japanese/japanese-punctuation/
If you see this smaller version of the hiragana つ, it is not pronounced "tsu" (ever!). […] If you see it at the end of a word (before the particle と in many onomatopoeia) then it's a glottal stop. That means it's kind of like a constricted sound in your throat (that's your glottis in there, thus the name). The katakana version looks like this ッ.
True or not?
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Vijay
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Re: Final glottal stop in Japanese

Post by Vijay »

I seem to remember reading that it makes the preceding vowel shorter, but yeah, that's probably true.

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clawgrip
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Re: Final glottal stop in Japanese

Post by clawgrip »

True at the end of an utterance. Utterance-final short vowels are generally followed a glottal stop anyway, but this makes it more "emphatic" like maybe a shorter vowel, exaggerated intonation, audible breathy release of the glottal stop, etc.

When followed by another consonant it's just a geminate though.

I just happened to see a perfect example so I took a picture. You can see they Romanized ぐるっと as grutto ("guru" to "gru" is just to make ir Englishy though). Anyway, just a geminate.
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finlay
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Re: Final glottal stop in Japanese

Post by finlay »

It's weird when they do it with a voiced consonant, though, like レッド or キッズ because then it sounds like a glottal stop again [reʔdo] or [kiʔdzu] or maybe an unreleased voiceless consonant, or the voicing just disappears. Like it's definitely not a geminate [red:o] in this case.

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Re: Final glottal stop in Japanese

Post by Vijay »

Wouldn't [kiʔdzu] be キッヅ?

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clawgrip
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Re: Final glottal stop in Japanese

Post by clawgrip »

ヅ and ズ are pronounced identically as /zu/. The distinction between them is lost. Standard transliterations from English into katakana rarely use ヅ, and on the rare occasion they do (and I can't think of any), it's a stylistic choice. The standard way to render "kids" is キッズ, but this is clearly not pronounced [kiz:u]; it's much more like what finlay indicated.

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Hakaku
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Re: Final glottal stop in Japanese

Post by Hakaku »

See The Phonetics of sokuon, or geminate obstruents, by Shigeto Kawahara, and specifically sections 5.3 & 5.4

The summary is that a some have argued in the past that geminates in Japanese involve some form of glottal or laryngeal constriction. But a few others recently found no evidence for any such constriction.

So the answer for now is that no, obstruent geminates in Japanese don't involve full glottal stops.
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finlay
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Re: Final glottal stop in Japanese

Post by finlay »

the paragraph ends with "still to be explored" though, and the first section starts with "it would be interesting to investigate ..." – these are unsubtle code words that mean "we don't know"

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