Basically just the title, as it seems to be completely silent but I’m sure there’s a reason for it. Like for う it makes no sound but extends the sound before it. So I’m just wondering why つ is needed here.
Its a small っ and it basically tells you that the letter following it will have a double consonant sound.
Kip-pu rather than kipu
Gak-kou rather than gakou
It’s a very soft glottal stop before the consonant.
When such words are written in romaji, it’s shown by a double consonant. This, incidentally, leads to Japanese speakers making the mistake of thinking double consonants are pronounced that way in English.
it’s so that you say tsu, but very quietly
Care is needed to differentiate between small tsu & normal size tsu when reading/writing in hiragana. Probably a typo, but in your question, the first word correctly has small tsu, but the second is incorrectly large tsu. Can’t immediately think of any words as an example, but could have very different meanings.
The sokuon exists to cause suffering to anyone attempting to learn this language. You might liken it to a tiny demon that hides inside kanji when you are trying to remember how to read them.
If you’re writing きぷ without the つ, then it is kipu. But if you add that small つ, then it becomes kippu.
The small っ makes a little pause before the next letter, while another う or even a ー would extend the sound instead of pausing it.
がっこう is gakkou Means you make a small pause to, in a way, over enunciate the k sound
It occurs to me you got a lot of answers telling you what it’s doing but less in the way of “why.” I think you can get closer if you focus on Sino-Japanese words (漢語).
Chinese characters are one syllable, but many Japanese on-yomi are two syllables (for the purposes of this discussion I do mean syllables rather than morae). Why is that?
This is not true of modern Mandarin, but in Chinese at the time these borrowings were made, you could have syllable-ending consonants. You can see remnants of this in other languages; for instance, in Korean, 學生 (=学生) is read “hak saeng.” In Japanese, these ended up being extra syllables with a weak vowel at the end (i, u) — so you get がく because “gak” is not possible.
When these readings are combined back into words, they go into fairly regular transformations. For instance, 学校 has a k – weak vowel – k, so these end up combined into the geminate and you get the reading がっこう.
つ in particular is an ending with interesting behavior, since it doesn’t require the “same consonant,” but will still pair with the next character in the same way in some cases. Think about words like 出発 or 発表. There’s an h->p transformation there which is also regular but I forget the exact rules… anyway, at one point you would have just written these with a full-size つ (and also other spelling differences, I think you might get はつひやう or something like that, but don’t quote me, it’s been a while). Well, eventually they started writing it half-width to distinguish this use and then by analogy it just became the generic “doubling” mark.
Is this very useful to you as a student of modern Japanese? Well, not that much, but sometimes furigana is very small and hard to read and if you know this you won’t have to guess if you’re looking at つ or っ because it’s rarely plausible that it could be both.
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Its a small っ and it basically tells you that the letter following it will have a double consonant sound.
Kip-pu rather than kipu
Gak-kou rather than gakou
It’s a very soft glottal stop before the consonant.
When such words are written in romaji, it’s shown by a double consonant. This, incidentally, leads to Japanese speakers making the mistake of thinking double consonants are pronounced that way in English.
it’s so that you say tsu, but very quietly
Care is needed to differentiate between small tsu & normal size tsu when reading/writing in hiragana. Probably a typo, but in your question, the first word correctly has small tsu, but the second is incorrectly large tsu. Can’t immediately think of any words as an example, but could have very different meanings.
The sokuon exists to cause suffering to anyone attempting to learn this language. You might liken it to a tiny demon that hides inside kanji when you are trying to remember how to read them.
If you’re writing きぷ without the つ, then it is kipu. But if you add that small つ, then it becomes kippu.
The small っ makes a little pause before the next letter, while another う or even a ー would extend the sound instead of pausing it.
がっこう is gakkou
Means you make a small pause to, in a way, over enunciate the k sound
It occurs to me you got a lot of answers telling you what it’s doing but less in the way of “why.” I think you can get closer if you focus on Sino-Japanese words (漢語).
Chinese characters are one syllable, but many Japanese on-yomi are two syllables (for the purposes of this discussion I do mean syllables rather than morae). Why is that?
This is not true of modern Mandarin, but in Chinese at the time these borrowings were made, you could have syllable-ending consonants. You can see remnants of this in other languages; for instance, in Korean, 學生 (=学生) is read “hak saeng.” In Japanese, these ended up being extra syllables with a weak vowel at the end (i, u) — so you get がく because “gak” is not possible.
When these readings are combined back into words, they go into fairly regular transformations. For instance, 学校 has a k – weak vowel – k, so these end up combined into the geminate and you get the reading がっこう.
つ in particular is an ending with interesting behavior, since it doesn’t require the “same consonant,” but will still pair with the next character in the same way in some cases. Think about words like 出発 or 発表. There’s an h->p transformation there which is also regular but I forget the exact rules… anyway, at one point you would have just written these with a full-size つ (and also other spelling differences, I think you might get はつひやう or something like that, but don’t quote me, it’s been a while). Well, eventually they started writing it half-width to distinguish this use and then by analogy it just became the generic “doubling” mark.
Is this very useful to you as a student of modern Japanese? Well, not that much, but sometimes furigana is very small and hard to read and if you know this you won’t have to guess if you’re looking at つ or っ because it’s rarely plausible that it could be both.