Is it senpai or sempai? This is important for anime viewing
Spanish's mp rule doesn't apply to Japanese.
>>288534999Ackshully that's wrong
>>288534961Spelled senpai, pronounced sempai.
>>288534961sempaisampoyojimbowhat else
Why isn't it amime
A lot of people on /a/ don't seem to understand assimilation. It's when a sound takes on some aspect of a sound made after it to make it easier to pronounce. The p sound is bilabial and so it may cause the n preceding it to take on a bilabial characteristic, making it change from an n sound to an m. You can still pronounce it clearly as an n though, but when speaking quickly it's more likely to be assimilated into an m sound. There's no reason to change the spelling of the word to show this though, and while none come to mind I'm sure there are other similar words where the spelling is never changed. The spelling in Japanese is せんぱい (senpai).
>>288535252に isn't ん
>>288535285"ん = n" isn't really true though. That's the problem with romaji, it will never be equivalent.
>>288534961It's actually paisen.
>>288535289It isn't different enough from the English n sound to be so pedantic about it. It's going to sound the same for the vast majority of people. And if you want to be that pedantic you better just never write Japanese words with latin characters. >[t, d, n] are variously described as lamino-alveolar ([t̻, d̻, n̻]),[24] apico-alveolar ([t̺, d̺, n̺]) or apico-dental ([t̪̺, d̪̺, n̪̺]),[25][26] or simply dental[27] or denti-alveolar.[28][29]People are going to interpret sounds in languages other than their own through the sounds they use for their language. The difference of a fraction of a millimeter on the tongue or whatever small amount isn't going to make it sound like something completely different to an English or even other European language speaker.
>>288535411Nice cope but ん can be n or m. It's sempai.
>>288535488That's the assimilation I was talking about previously, anon. I'm sure you don't change the spelling in English or whatever your first language is when this happens, but you'll do it for Japanese because for some people Japanese is some mystical language.
>>288535488is it semsei too?
>>288535548The "spelling" isn't being changed. The transliteration is reflecting the actual word as it is pronounced. If we followed your bad logic in a reverse example, then the English word "people" would be written as ペオプレ in Japanese instead of ピープル.
>>288535548>I'm sure you don't change the spelling in English>imprint>impulse>imbibe>immutable>empathy>embolden>embrittled>empower>embark
>>288535595You can clearly hear the n in senpai often though. It's not always changed to m. Changing the spelling because of some linguistic rule that isn't even always applied is retarded. People is always pronounced that one way, I don't think there's any changes that would happen to change the pronunciation. Let's see some other similar examples to this.>こんばん -> komban>がんばる -> gambaru>ほんばん -> hombanEtc. Would you change any of those n's to m's?>>288535694Those are the spellings of those words. If anything the opposite may happen here where someone may pronounce impulse as inpulse, but you wouldn't change the spelling because of that. Those words are not related to what we're talking about. I don't know the history of them so maybe they're spelling that way now because of the assimilation over a long period of time, but again, that isn't what we're talking about here. We're talking about there being multiple spellings of one word because in some instances someone may pronounce it a different way (which would be like I said above about someone pronouncing impulse as inpulse).
>>288535754https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-isgSLAJc8I
>>288535488>ん can be n or m THEREFORE it can only be sempai with mare you stupidserious question
>>288536068Is this your new cope? That's it's a matter of opinion? Holy shit you dekinai faggot.
>>288534961I always say semenpie, maybe is just me.
romaji isn't real
>>288534961Neither. Or both. It doesn't matter. Z,S, K,C, R,L, M,N, B,V, it's all the same letter at the end of the day.
>>288536175i guess the only acceptable spelling is seんpai
>>288536175Keyboards disagree
It's pai-seN not Pai-seM
>>288536200shiet, I came into this thread just to do this and you beat me to it.
>>288536603/thread
千おっぱい
Ok then wise guy, is it Tenpura or Tempura?
>>288537293Yes
it's 先輩
>>288534961M is a corruption. It uses the same mouth shape as certain plosives (p and b), so people mispronounce it by failing to enunciate with their tongue first. Just like せんせー, just because (some) natives use it (sometimes) doesn't mean it's correct.
>>288535307>>288536603>>288536967
>>288537582Forgot pic >facepalm
>>288537582>corruptionSpeech and regional accents and colloquialisms came before written language. ん is a compromise.No writing is ever 100% accurate to the spoken language it's adapting, even supposedly "phonetical" writing systems.
>use japanese keyboard>せｍぱい>せんぱいgee, I wonder which one is correct
I bet you faggots pronounce さん like san instead of like saŋ
>>288535303>>288535595>>288536175>transliteration is reflecting the actual word as it is pronouncedHere's a trick: how do you pronounce "ghoti"? English spelling is morphophonemic, which means spelling isn't just determined by the familiar sounds of letters, but also by the relationships between words, that is component parts and their history. When anglicizing an unrelated language, English will adopt its system as closely as possible to not just represent phonetics but also semantics and morphology. It's very flexible at adapting them, which is why oo and ou are more accurate and intelligible than oh or ō. In short, you should expect 'n' may sound like 'm' to you to represent 'sen' by itself, but the 'n' sound can also still be correct.>>288537736Written and spoken languages are parallel systems, you're basically assuming that spoken language froze entirely before writing emerged. There's no hierarchy between the two. Formal language, however, is created as a baseline which colloquialisms practically are layered over or technically branch from. If you have the etymological sources to prove your point though, I'm happy to see it.
>>288537984That's not a real letter
>>288537988the ghoti thing is fucking retarded, every goddamn linguistic pseudointellectual keeps using it without understand how linguistics actually works. The dude who came up with it is equally retarded. No word in the English language starts with gh and is pronounced "f," and no word ends in ti and has the pronunciation of "sh." The reason we pronounce it "f" and "sh" because of WHERE it is in the word and its relation to the rest of the letters in the word. If it has an "f" sound, the gh be at the end of a word, or near the end of the word. Whenever a word starts with gh it's pronounced like "guh," never like "f." Same with ti, it's almost always part of tion, so like addition, subtraction, creation, deletion, or with dipthongs like ratio, minutia. Whenever ti is at the end of a word, it's usually some Romance language loan and will always end in a "tea" sound, never a "sh" sound.And "women" is the only word in the english language where o makes an "i" sound. In fact, it actually used to be written "wimen" because the word comes from the combination of wife and man. RRhe wife of a man is a woman, ergo "wifman" -> "wiman" -> "woman"Whoever made ghoti is taking linguistic rules from completely unrelated parts of words and trying to put them where they don't belong. The entire word matters in pronunciation, you can't just take whatever phoneme you want and shove them wherever, there are rules that English follows that these motherfuckers just ignore because."lmao, English is so WACKY amirite guys????" without even understanding the fucking rules first. If ghoti was a real word, then it would not be pronounced "fish" it would be pronounced "goatie" if we actually took the rules of english and applied them properly.>oh, but what about these super duper rare words no one has ever heard in 200 years that actually do begin with gh and are pronounced "f" and these words that literally no has ever heard that end in ti but are pronounced "sh"????? what now?????????
>>288538169That's the point, retard.>In fact, it actually used to be written "wimen" because the word comes from the combination of wife and manEnglish wasn't morphographic until after the Great Vowel Shift, bro.
>>288538336Yeah my b. I couldn't really tell your stance on it, so I avoided directly calling you a retard just in case.
just listen, you fuckers watch enough anime you should be able to tell by now.
>>288534961It's just hepburn or not hepburnMost shit is translated by hepburn standard but if you watch something like watanare they didn't use hepburn so you got satuki instead of satsuki.
>>288535587Apparently, it's only when n is followed by p or b sound. So 便利 (べんり / convenient) is benri not bemri.
>>288538452Modified Hepburn my belovedYou bet your ass we out here in Toukyou eating tenpura and drinking maccha with Yudzuki-chan
>>288538399Well it was a fun rant, so thanks anyways.
>>288538504yeah, about thatん actually has way more than just 2 pronunciationshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M-2LjAWb3M
Chimpo makes it look like the name of a primate instead of looking like my Chinpo COCK
ロ゚ル゚レ゚マオ
>>288538517Thank you!Sorry for assuming stuff.
>>288538650's cool dude*kisses you on the lips*
>>288534961It's sine(π)Do you guys even math?
>>288534961We just don't know.
>dzu
>>288540667ʒu
>>288535285There are multiple ways to romanize Japanese, anon.
>>288537984No I pronounce it "sam" like a normal person
>>288536603Damn nobody can refute this
>>288540735The Japanese do not speak Japanese correctly
How do elevens know what kanji they are using when they speak aloud considering so many are pronounced the same
>>288540760Context. Same as with English.If someone said the read a book, you know they're not talking about the color red.
>>288540789 But correct me if I'm wrong there are FAR more kanji homophones than English ones?
FOOOOO!
it's semper-fai
>>288540789Explain how you tell 私立 and 市立 apart based on context.Same for 公爵 and 侯爵.
>>288540760Often words that 'sound the same' to the gaijin have different pitch accents but if they really are the same context clues help with that, like in English for words like 'bat'
syoganai
>>288540760You phrase your statements in such a way as to reduce the amount of ambiguity in the statement. You can usually tell if what you're about to say might be confusing, so they'll intentionally rephrase their statements to make it less confusing. If their interlocutor still can't parse their meaning then they will either use a synonym, or will literally just say the other readings of the kanji they're trying to use. It's kinda funny hearing it in person
why can't you cumsock-munching retards actually learn Japanese instead of bickering about whichever random bits and pieces you picked up lacking proper context
>>288540852It helps that you will rarely ever say those words by themselves. (you also rarely say those words anyways). But you usually stick a city name before 市立, or a person's name before 公爵, in which you can easily tell which kanji they mean if you're familiar with the city or person.Like how in English you can say Mister T, or Prince, and know they're both referring to the famous black guys and not nebulously referring to every single gentleman with the initial T, or some random unnamed prince.Like how you can tell the difference "California's in a bad state" and "California's a bad state" pretty easily in English. Normalized/cliche sentence structure usually clues you in to the correct understanding. If you have a solid grasp of the language and sentence cliches, then you should need that much help distinguishing between homophones. I don't have a better word for "cliche" that's just the first thing that popped into my head that made sense for the regular pattern of sentence structure we typically use.
>>288540969>then you should need that much help distinguishing between homophones*shouldn'tI'm gay and I suck cocks
>>288540866>nihon siki
>>288540969>But you usually stick a city name before 市立,Not at all. It will be the start of the full name of an institution such as a school and you'll use it in isolation when talking about what kind of school you went to. Some people will say わたくしりつ to remove ambiguity.
>>288540924The people actually learning Japanese are reading posts in Japanese instead of posts about Japanese. The information you gain and become exposed to here, in comparison, is just noise.
>>288541021I just google searched it and it's pretty much just all [name]市立I just realized I said "stick a city name before" when I really meant "stick a name before". I live right next to a community center that has the name of the city in it, so I accidentally said "city name" when it's really just any old name that'll work.Doing more research, it seems that people do actually confuse 市立 and 私立 a lot, so they'll say いちりつ and わたしりつ to avoid confusion. I've never heard that before.
Senpai ha... suki...
sempaiUsing "senpai" is a way for illiterate children or ESL third-worlders to out themselves as picking up their first Japanese textbook and looking up "ん = n" in the hiragana alphabet chart. Or using MTL.
>>288537978They both work though? You should stop lying.
>>288541334/thread
>>288534961>This is important for anime viewingLiar. The fact that a number of people here are only learning this for the first time proves that it's unnecessary information we can do without.
>>288541334Some YT videos have been teaching "ん = n"Also, >>288537978
>>288541867先輩also you romaji typing app doesn't mean shit
>>288536603Irrefutable.
>>288536603>>288541939>sound is modified by context>"what if i remove the context i guess it doesn't work then huh huh huh *retard face*"Yeah ok dumbass. I guess は is never wa. It's ha.
Arr took the sameArr soumd the same
>>288541334You hear both senpai and sempai in speech. ん does equal n in 90% of cases and you would only maybe transliterate it as m before bilabial consonants. If you always heard sempai then sure, write it like that, but the fact that it is n in most cases and you still do hear senpai to me means always writing it as sempai is stupid. But people also use nihon shiki so there's already plenty of retardation in the Japanese transliteration space.
>>288542419>>288535931
If you're using romaji you're already wrong so it doesn't matter
>>288542578>>288535411You don't do this for any language other than Japanese. This is on par with saying nakama is an untranslatable word.
>>288542578>there are 6 n's in Japanese>but they're all written with the same character (ん)>that character can also be m>but you can't use one letter when transliterating to the latin alphabet>but it's fine if you only use 2 letters (m and n)
>>288542419>You hear both senpai and sempai in speech. Post 10 samples from anime clips.Written language is derived from spoken language. Humans spoke before we wrote down the words we say. Romanji is inherently flawed but should at least attempt to represent the spoken language of Japanese. Who pronounce "sempai" as the overwhelming common default.
Try actually sounding out both senpai and sempai with your own mouth and you'll see why sempai is obviously correct and the common pronunciation.I forget all the phonetic terms, but "nnn" involves pressing your tongue to the top of your mouth, while "mmm" involves pressing your lips together. "Puh" is produced by compressing and releasing your lips. The transition from the pressed lips of "mmm" to the "puh" is a very natural anatomical action, so it's clear why it's the standard pronunciation."nnn" and "mmm" sound similar in rapid speech so it's understandable that retards would mishear sempai as senpai and falsely reinforce their flawed understanding of the word, since they're expecting the "nnn" sound because they looked at the hiragana chart or believed MTL.
>>288542782If you want to represent sounds - you should write in a phontetic alpabet, not English.
>>288534961Let me guess, you retards don't write long vowels either, because you can't personally pronounce them?
>>288542782Not going to find 10 but here's 4. The first 3 sound like n to me while the last one sounds like m. We could do all kinds of linguistic analysis on the sounds if we wanted but I doubt anyone has any interest in doing so. Even sounding like n to me, if you look/listen close enough maybe there is some bilabial aspect to them still so it's not entirely an n sound. Hopefully I remember correctly how to link to another board.>>>/wsg/6165826>>>/wsg/6165828>>>/wsg/6165829>>>/wsg/6165830>>288542988One thing though is that it's easy to "hang" on the n sound in the word senpai. Which I think is what happens when you hear more of a n sound than an m sound. The m sound is what happens when you don't hang on the n. What also keeps it from assimilating in all cases from what I can tell is the Japanese way of keeping sounds separate. In English we tend to group n's in the middle of words with the previous syllable, while in Japanese they tend to treat them as separate. So if you said senpai while speaking English you would likely group it as sen-pai, while in Japanese it's more like se-n-pai, with the n being its own syllable (or mora). Obviously fast speech tends to negate any of these ways of thinking though.
>>288543210https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WelpYSo1uT0Just listen to this. Literally all of them are "m", before "b" too.
The operant issue is that ん is neither an "n" or an "m" sound, it's something that is vaguely similar to both that generally is closer to "n" (and looks better Romanized as such). For the sake of consistency just making it always "n" makes sense.Like we don't interchange "ら" as being "sometimes 'ra', sometimes 'la', sometimes 'da'" just because the actual sound of ら is a noise that is best described as "something in between 'ra', 'la' and 'da'."
>>288543516That's not the issue at all. As mentioned above, there are at least 6 different sounds, one of which is close to English /n/, and another to /m/.
>>288543546And again, if there are 6 distinct sounds why are you arguing for using two letters to represent it (n and m) and not 6? You're limiting yourself to just saying using only n is wrong and not that using only n and m is wrong, with whatever other symbols you'd want to use for the other sounds. We're talking about informal representation here, not using IPA in a linguistic paper, which is what you'd be doing if you wanted to be that specific.
>>288543546We don't Romanize す as "sometimes 'su', sometimes 's'" and that's far more distinct in the sound they make.
>>288534961Depends on the transliteration system. If it's phonemic, then senpai, if it's phonetic, then probably sempai.
>>288534961Sem pai means without a father
>>288543655We should."Gambarimas!">>288543620Because by using "m", we can tell readers unfamiliar with Japanese phonetics how it's pronounced. Why shouldn't we use a letter for the sound it represents in English? Those 6 sounds arguably fit pretty well into two boxes, "n" and "m".If you want to approximate kana spelling, just use kunrei-siki, I don't mind.
>>288541983huh?
>>288534961senpai is the correct spelling (せんぱい) sempai doesnt exist on japanese. the most similar can say semupai (with む instead of ん)
>>288543851In manga they do sometimes use nonstandard spellings to show differences in pronunciation. I have never seen anything like せむぱい though to accentuate the m sound. And again, if Japanese has 6 n sounds plus the m sound, all represented by the same character, then they apparently don't care much about it, so why should you or I try to distinguish even more when writing it with latin characters?
i like how the senpai does not sound like the m without word in manga and raito novel unless the nakadani does it too
>>288543997Because it's allophonic variation. Native speakers are necessarily not even aware that they do it. Do you consciously think about the fact that you pronounce "the" differently depending on the following sound (presuming a standard accent)?
>>288544594I'm saying why people are so insistent on differentiating when writing in latin characters if they're not doing that for every difference in pronunciation Japanese has, and Japanese writing isn't even differentiating.
>>288541983How would you pronounce 輩先? Haisaki, Yakarasaki?
>>288534961You'd only want to write it "sempai" if you're trying to equate writing and pronunciation, at which point you'd read "otaku" as "oteiku".
>>288544684>you'd read "otaku" as "oteiku".Only if you're a retarded american. Euros (who invented the latin alphabet btw) will pronounce it right.
>>288545081The british are still anglos and not european like you probably mean but I swear the british pronounce Japanese much worse than americans from what I've seen.
>>288544684Are you implying that I'm supposed to pronounce otaku as "oh-tay-ku"
why do japanese even have ん to begin with
>>288542782>>288537988>>288543508No, I hear the tongue in all of those.
>>288545209He's saying that some English speakers probably would.If you think they wouldn't you should consider how English speakers say words like "Subaru" or "konbucha." Or there are even people who call themselves weebs who read "-chan" and still pronounce it like "Jackie Chan."
>>288543851>we can tell readers unfamiliar with Japanese phonetics how it's pronouncedThat's a fool's errand when they won't actually learn anything and continue to say Huh-ROW-shi-ma, REE-yoo, Nuh-ROO-toe, etc. Pokémon even has the accented e and people still get it wrong. They either care or they don't.
>>288545209Yes, anon. That's exactly what I'm saying. You're so smart.
>>288545550>Pokémon even has the accented e and people still get it wrong.Why didn't they call it Pocket Monsters like the Japanese?
>>288545868Sounds suggestive and also less fun.Also there was a line of toys in the 90s called "Monster in My Pocket."
>>288534961ん is an underspecified nasal in linguistic terms. It's whatever nasal consonant it needs to be to match the place of articulation of the succeeding consonant.
>>288542988I disagree, so you're wrong.
>>288542988That's why phonetic alphabets exist, anon, and the latin alphabet isn't one of them. You don't write "wimen" as the plural of "woman", so there's no reason not to write it as "senpai".
It's SENPAIThe "m" sound comes naturally when transitioning from the n to the p when pronouncing the word
