Forum for Inoue
Confused about pronunciation [#15417]
I'm looking at this sentence: Its Japanese pronunciation treats all vowels separately, as "i-no-u-e" (いのうえ in hiragana), with no "ou" diphthong.
I'm far from an expert, but in the past I've been told that "ou" in Japanese represents a long "o" sound in standard pronunciation (although it can be "o" followed by "u" in some dialects). So "no" followed by "u" would be counted as two syllables, but with the same vowel, not two different vowels.
Is this what the article is trying to describe, or is "Inoue" actually an exception to this rule?
In either case, whether it's long "o" or separate "o"-"u", it's not a diphthong. As far as I'm aware, Japanese never contains diphthongs, so the phrasing 'with no "ou" diphthong' is confusing for me (and "ou" has a few different pronunciations in English).
Referring to ![[ext]](images/extlink.gif)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Japanese, is it inooe or inoɯe or something different again?
I'd expect the usual English pronunciation to be "i-NOH-ay" ("noh" as English no).
Or "i-NOH-ee" (cf. sake, and UK vs US pronunciations of Chile).
Stress on the first syllable is also reasonable.
The spelling Inoé is a good representation of the Anglicised way of saying the name (in the vein of those books that helpfully use forms like hané (as in café) to differentiate the E). In the ligature oé, the O must be long so we don't need to indicate that.
"noh" as English no -- are you sure? English "no" is a diphthong not a pure vowel (and not necessarily the same diphthong depending on which variety of English you speak: see https://magoosh.com/english-speaking/the-oh-diphthong-as-in-no/, or, worse, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/dec/14/naur-yeah-australia-youre-performing-linguistic-magic-when-you-pronounce-the-two-letter-word-no-heres-why). Do you mean "noh" as in English "not" but with the vowel sound twice as long?
Spelling out these things with English words is fraught. That's why I provided a link to international phonetic alphabet symbols.
I think you're describing what I learned in beginner Japanese class (and I never got past beginner level), and I think Jono64 is saying no, this is an exception to the rules. I guess.
In this case, native Japanese speaker hnishy provided the phonetic hiragana of the name いのうえ, and they clearly correspond to “i-no-u-e”.
There is a tendency in English speakers to read any “ou” in the French way (also in many English words), i.e. pronounced like the English “oo”. In Japanese, as you say, sometimes the long Japanese o sound is romanized to “ou”, but not here. Google Translate, with a presumably native Japanese speaker pronouncing Japanese words, speaks the name 井上 in those four syllables.
No problem with the acute accent, as long as it’s understood in the French way as indicating a particular sound, not a stress as in Spanish or Greek.
Thanks, but that does not actually clear things up.
...hiragana of the name いのうえ, and they clearly correspond to “i-no-u-e”
But you have words like きのう (meaning "yesterday") where the hiragana [clearly] correspond to ki-no-u, but it's not pronounced that way, it's pronounced with a long "o" sound.
From my googling around about the name 井上, I suppose its structure is 井 (い / i) + unwritten possessive marker (の / no) + 上 (うえ / ue), so the の and う doesn't join together to form nou. Just my guess though - probably 山手線 (やまのてせん / yamanotesen) has the same structure.
As for 昨日 (きのう / kinou), Wiktionary says that it is a jukujikun, i.e., a special inseparable reading assigned to the multiple-kanji term.
![[Welcome to Sensei's Library!]](images/stone-hello.png "Sensei's Library")