Help talk:IPA/Japanese

Dear user:Nardog, your insistence on an uncommon word like re-equalize is problematic, for that it is not found the way it is in dictionaries and the two E's actually belong to two syllables {{IPA|/ˌɹiːˈiːkwəlaɪz/}}. English approximations should provide common words with the closest vowels. I attempted to give a more common word with the {{IPAslink|iː}} sound unbroken in two syllables, but you didn't like it, reasoning that it's "one vowel", which is not. --Esperfulmo (talk) 00:34, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

:It seems you thought /iː/ represented an inherently long vowel, but as Vowel length explains, few varieties of English contrast vowels in length only, and many sources represent the same vowel (the FLEECE vowel) as /i/. Not only deed but meet, which exemplifies [i] here, have the FLEECE vowel, so deed wouldn't help illustrate what {{angbr|ː}} means—perhaps unless they're next to each other as in Help:IPA/Danish etc., but given Japanese is mora-based, I don't think that approach (using pre-fortis clipping to illustrate durational difference) is appropriate here and instead we need something like re-equalize to emphasize that {{angbr|ː}} indicates "twice as long". Nardog (talk) 01:52, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

::Not contrasting vowels by length in English doesn't mean that some vowels aren't longer than others. A word like sheet pronounced by an Italian colleague sounded pretty much like shit with a raised i, because in their pronunciation they really don't contrast length in such a position. --Esperfulmo (talk) 21:41, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

This page claims to represent both Japanese and Okinawan, but according to Okinawan language#Consonants, Okinawan retains the labialised /kʷ/ and /ɡʷ/ that Japanese lost. Those are not represented in the key. Double sharp (talk) 05:09, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

:I've watched and edited this key for years and somehow I never noticed it said it covered Okinawan! Okinawan has a different ISO 639 code, and {{tl|IPA-ryu}} doesn't link to this page and is used in nine articles (and at least five of them use it for other Ryukyuan languages). I've gone through every IPA-ja transclusions a couple times some years ago and never seen it used for Okinawan (and if I had I would have replaced it). As you point out the key does not actually cover Okinawan and a key for Okinawan/Ryukyuan should be created separately if there are enough use cases (which there aren't atm). Removing boldly. Nardog (talk) 16:33, 16 April 2023 (UTC)