Help talk:IPA/Japanese

Long /iː/ not broken /iˈi/
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. English approximations should provide common words with the closest vowels. I attempted to give a more common word with the 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 $⟨ː⟩$ 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 $⟨ː⟩$ 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)

Does this really represent Okinawan, as claimed?
This page claims to represent both Japanese and Okinawan, but according to Okinawan language, 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 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)