Fonetika

Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as unvoiced) or voiced. Voicing can refer to the articulatory process in which the vocal folds vibrate, its primary use in phonetics to describe phones, which are particular speech sounds. It can also refer to a classification of speech sounds that tend to be associated with vocal cord vibration but may not actually be voiced at the articulatory level. That is the term's primary use in phonology: to describe phonemes; while in phonetics its primary use is to describe phones. For example, voicing accounts for the difference between the pair of sounds associated with the English letters <s> and <z>. The two sounds are transcribed as and to distinguish them from the English letters, which have several possible pronunciations, depending on the context. If one places the fingers on the voice box (i.e., the location of the Adam's apple in the upper throat), one can feel a vibration while is pronounced but not with. (For a more detailed, technical explanation, see modal voice and phonation.) In most European languages, with a notable exception being Icelandic, vowels and other sonorants (consonants such as m, n, l, and r) are modally voiced.

Japanese phonology is the system of sounds used in the pronunciation of the Japanese language. Unless otherwise noted, this article describes the standard variety of Japanese based on the Tokyo dialect. There is no overall consensus on the number of contrastive individual sounds (phonemes). Common approaches recognize at least 12 distinct consonants (as many as 21 in some analyses) and 5 distinct vowels, /a, e, i, o, u/. Phonetic length is contrastive for both vowels and consonants, and the total length of Japanese words can be measured in a unit of timing called the mora (from Latin mora "delay"). Only limited types of consonant clusters are permitted. Japanese speech also has a pitch accent system in which the position or absence of a pitch drop may determine the meaning of a word: /haꜜsiɡa/, /hasiꜜɡa/, /hasiɡa/. Japanese phonology has been affected by the presence of several layers of vocabulary in the language. In addition to native Japanese vocabulary, Japanese has a large amount of Chinese-based vocabulary (used especially to form technical and learned words, playing a similar role to Latin-based vocabulary in English) and loanwords from other languages. Different layers of vocabulary allow different possible sound sequences (phonotactics). Called wago or yamato kotoba in Japanese, this category consists of inherited native vocabulary. Morphemes in this category show a number of restrictions on structure that may be violated by vocabulary in other layers. Japanese possesses a variety of mimetic words that make use of sound symbolism to serve an expressive function. Like Yamato vocabulary, these words are also of native origin, and can be considered to belong to the same overarching group. However, words of this type show some phonological peculiarities that cause some theorists to regard them as a separate layer of Japanese vocabulary. Called kango in Japanese, words in this stratum originate from several waves of large-scale borrowing from Chinese that occurred from the 6th-14th centuries AD. They comprise 60% of dictionary entries and 20% of ordinary spoken Japanese, ranging from formal vocabulary to everyday words. Most Sino-Japanese words are composed of more than one Sino-Japanese morpheme. Sino-Japanese morphemes have a limited phonological shape: each has a length of at most two moras, which Ito & Mester (2015a) argue reflects a restriction in size to a single prosodic foot. These morphemes represent the Japanese phonetic adaptation of Middle Chinese monosyllabic morphemes, each generally represented in writing by a single Chinese character, taken into Japanese as kanji. Japanese writers also repurposed kanji to represent native vocabulary; as a result, there is a distinction between Sino-Japanese readings of kanji, called On'yomi, and native readings, called Kun'yomi. The moraic nasal /N/ is relatively common in Sino-Japanese, and contact with Middle Chinese is often described as being responsible for the presence of /N/ in Japanese (starting from approximately 800 AD in Early Middle Japanese), although /N/ also came to exist in native Japanese words as a result of sound changes. Called gairaigo in Japanese, this layer of vocabulary consists of non-Sino-Japanese words of foreign origin, mostly borrowed from Western languages after the 16th century; many of them entered the language in the 20th century. In words of this stratum, a number of consonant-vowel sequences that did not previously exist in Japanese are tolerated, which has led to the introduction of new spelling conventions and complicates the phonemic analysis of these consonant sounds in Japanese.