HomeLearn JapaneseWhy do the Japanese always add a vowel to the end of consonants, but they don’t do that on the one word they’re actually supposed to do it to?
The word desu is often pronounced dess. I don’t get why vowels are added to so many other words endings but the word desu has its official vowel chopped off.
Technically, there’s no “u” at the end of “desu”, but a “す”. Romanization puts a “u” at the end.
Certain sounds like きand す are just hard to hear when you say the words fast so it sounds like they’re not there at all. For example だいすき sometimes sounds more like “dai-ski”. The “oo” sound gets dropped off because it feels a bit cumbersome to have to enunciate.
Well Americans don’t pronounce the T in waTer either. It’s just easier to call it wader.
“〜です” and “〜ます” are irregular. No other morpheme displays word-final devoicing like that as far as I know, in fact, it’s even devoiced in cases such as “〜ですね” which especially would not happen.
Languages have irregular realizations of common morphemes all the time. For instance in English, many dialects that otherwise do not render intervocalic /t/ as a glottal stop will do it in cases of “that is bad” but not in cases of “fat is bad”.
Have you ever noticed how many letters the English language doesnt pronounce? Tell me why instead of “sword” youre supposed to say “sod”.
In any case, since hiragana and katakana are syllabaries, except vowels ( and ん ) there is no hiragana/katakana to represent single consonants like “s”.
In part it’s that Japanese is spoken very, very quickly — partially because the standard vowels are pronounced for about half as long as standard English vowels (double vowels are about as long as standard English) and partially because the language, in general, is not semantically dense — that is, the semantic content per chunk of sound, if you go mora-by-mora (ie, the equivalent of syllable-by-syllable), is lower than in English, so you need to make more sounds to express the same amount of semantic content.
For these reasons, Japanese is indeed spoken very quickly relative to English, and there are often “short-cuts” made. It isn’t only ~ です and ~ます, where the final “u” gets swallowed up, it’s also in a lot of other places as well. In general, the final “u” in a mora is often swallowed or at the very least very subtly spoken so as to be barely heard. You can see this in particular in a lot of loan words rendered in katakana — like say ベースボル is pronounced more like bay-s-bow-r, and not bay-su-bo-ru. The “u” gets swallowed, mostly, at the end of those two moras.
And it isn’t only “u”, either. It is just common for things to get slurred together in Japanese, because it’s spoken very quickly, such that every single mora is not fully pronounced. This is especially true in very common constructions like した (“shita” pronounced more like “shta”) でした (“deshita” pronounced more like “deshta”), 明日 — the word for tomorrow which is sounded（あした) “ashita”, but pronounced more like “ashta” and so on.
Japanese is just a language that is spoken quickly and with a lot of “flow”. That results in quite a few moras not getting pronounced fully in normal spoken Japanese. It’s also why normal spoken Japanese sentences are often much shorter and more glib than what you see in textbooks (but that’s a different topic). In general, it’s why you need to spend time listening to actual native Japanese speakers speaking normally — podcasts with transcripts, YT with transcripts and so on are good for this (anime isn’t the greatest for it, because the spoken Japanese in it is very exaggerated compared to normal speech).
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Desu isn’t the only word that does that. It’s fairly common.
Dogen has [a public video explaining this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYQM7BhJJns). It’s called devoicing and happens with some i and u sounds, including desu.
Technically, there’s no “u” at the end of “desu”, but a “す”. Romanization puts a “u” at the end.
Certain sounds like きand す are just hard to hear when you say the words fast so it sounds like they’re not there at all. For example だいすき sometimes sounds more like “dai-ski”. The “oo” sound gets dropped off because it feels a bit cumbersome to have to enunciate.
Well Americans don’t pronounce the T in waTer either. It’s just easier to call it wader.
“〜です” and “〜ます” are irregular. No other morpheme displays word-final devoicing like that as far as I know, in fact, it’s even devoiced in cases such as “〜ですね” which especially would not happen.
Languages have irregular realizations of common morphemes all the time. For instance in English, many dialects that otherwise do not render intervocalic /t/ as a glottal stop will do it in cases of “that is bad” but not in cases of “fat is bad”.
Have you ever noticed how many letters the English language doesnt pronounce? Tell me why instead of “sword” youre supposed to say “sod”.
In any case, since hiragana and katakana are syllabaries, except vowels ( and ん ) there is no hiragana/katakana to represent single consonants like “s”.
In part it’s that Japanese is spoken very, very quickly — partially because the standard vowels are pronounced for about half as long as standard English vowels (double vowels are about as long as standard English) and partially because the language, in general, is not semantically dense — that is, the semantic content per chunk of sound, if you go mora-by-mora (ie, the equivalent of syllable-by-syllable), is lower than in English, so you need to make more sounds to express the same amount of semantic content.
For these reasons, Japanese is indeed spoken very quickly relative to English, and there are often “short-cuts” made. It isn’t only ~ です and ~ます, where the final “u” gets swallowed up, it’s also in a lot of other places as well. In general, the final “u” in a mora is often swallowed or at the very least very subtly spoken so as to be barely heard. You can see this in particular in a lot of loan words rendered in katakana — like say ベースボル is pronounced more like bay-s-bow-r, and not bay-su-bo-ru. The “u” gets swallowed, mostly, at the end of those two moras.
And it isn’t only “u”, either. It is just common for things to get slurred together in Japanese, because it’s spoken very quickly, such that every single mora is not fully pronounced. This is especially true in very common constructions like した (“shita” pronounced more like “shta”) でした (“deshita” pronounced more like “deshta”), 明日 — the word for tomorrow which is sounded（あした) “ashita”, but pronounced more like “ashta” and so on.
Japanese is just a language that is spoken quickly and with a lot of “flow”. That results in quite a few moras not getting pronounced fully in normal spoken Japanese. It’s also why normal spoken Japanese sentences are often much shorter and more glib than what you see in textbooks (but that’s a different topic). In general, it’s why you need to spend time listening to actual native Japanese speakers speaking normally — podcasts with transcripts, YT with transcripts and so on are good for this (anime isn’t the greatest for it, because the spoken Japanese in it is very exaggerated compared to normal speech).