The Japanese “r” sound doesn’t sound anything like r, so why does it translate to r in romanji? It acts as both r and l, but at least to me it sounds more like l.
Because it’s somewhere in the middle of the two and depending on your native language it can actually sound more to either side. Latin derived languages like spanish and italian use almost the exact same sound with their “R” and write it using that letter instead “L”.
Didn’t you mean ‘lomanji’?
I think it depends from the languages, it sure sounds a lot more like “l” in most languages.
The fact is that in japanese, we don’t have a sound close to “r”, japanese doesn’t need the use of the same muscle we use to speak english or french for example, so japanese people can’t pronounce “r”
But katakana is also use for phonetic, so anglicism will be writen in katakana, and in english words we have “r”, so the same character are use for “l” and “r”, since it sounds alike in japanese, and since they pronounce both the same way
That must be the reason why the person that made the romaji for the hiragana and katakana table (which mother tongue was english if I remember well) chose to put “r” besides “l”
I had to google to make it make more sense!
Romaji was invented in close relationships with Portuguese speaking priest around 1548.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with the rolled r that’s present in spanish, Portuguese, italien, etc. Well, it’s very close to the Japanese “r/l” sound and is pronounced at the front of the mouth.
The English r was not in their minds when they invented the romaji system so that’s why it seems like “r” is not close to the actual sound but “l” is.
However, for Portuguese speakers, their “r” sound is more accurate than the “l” sound.
Honestly I wouldn’t really say it sounds like an l or an r.
Regardless, English people attempting to write it down seem to have gone for those English letters and it has stuck. As long as you know that’s it’s ら that they’re referring to, I wouldn’t pay too much attention to romaji.
Maybe because I’m not a native English speaker but I’d say it hits pretty close to how I would pronounce an r sound. Like 来年 (らいねん) I’d certainly put that closer to an r sound than an l sound.
It sounds more like an r to me 🤔
like an r to me; can speak several european languages
Your response to Euffy is correct: ら is its own sound. It’s not a sound common to American English, which is one of the reasons why early learners of Japanese struggle with it. There’s a wikipedia page on the difference ([link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception_of_English_/r/_and_/l/_by_Japanese_speakers#:~:text=Japanese%20has%20one%20liquid%20phoneme,alveolar%20lateral%20approximant%20%5Bl%5D)). The page notes that the sound is variously heard as a “apico-alveolar tap [ɾ] and sometimes as an alveolar lateral approximant.” See the page itself for help with figuring out what those sounds are. My guess is that there is variation in Japanese itself that accounts for the difference sounds heard by linguists.
SirDeklan answered the question already, so all I can do is add to their post. When we come into contact with a sound that isn’t present in our own language, our minds approximate to a familiar sound. The Portuguese that SirDeklan referenced probably heard something like an /r/ or /l/ and did their best – they were probably either missionaries or merchants and may not have been interested in linguistic accuracy. Similarly, when learning English, many Japanese approximate our /th/ to a /t/. In cases of words like ‘time’ or names like ‘Tim’, many Japanese hear “chaimu” or “chimu”, and only when in language-learning settings (when language is often slowed down) do they perceive /ti/ instead of /chi/. English speakers, on the other hand, often don’t hear vowel lengths (e.g. tokyo vs. toukyo) that Japanese speakers discern normally and easily. I taught there a while back, and my Japanese colleagues and I would often tease one another on what we could hear and what we couldn’t from one another’s languages.
American English is actually extremely rare among world languages in that our R is what linguistics call a “rhotic” R, which is that “rrrrr” sound way in the back of your throat.
Very few languages have that, and in fact many local English dialects/accents have also evolved to drop the rhotic R because it’s so hard to say. (As an example, think Boston accent: “Pahk the cah in Hahvahd yahd.”)
Ironically, many regional accents in England itself, which invented English, don’t have rhotic R’s anymore either!
Instead, the rolled R, such as what you get in Spanish or Portuguese, which is closer to Japanese, is far more common across world languages. So it’s really the rhotic R that’s the odd man out in terms of picking what letter to use for romaji. Not the other way around.
As an italian, i must say it sounds way more like an “r” to me but then again there are of course italians who say otherwhise. Also it depends on regional variants, for example one philology professor used to say that in tokyoites you would probably hear an harsher “r”-like sound compared to people from some areas in Kansai, and yakuzas would purposefully try to make it sound more like “r” because “it sounds manlier”, whatever that means (at least that’s what he said).
I also noticed, but that may be my subjective impression, that in popular song lyrics they use “l” instead, in a way that to me sounds like their stressing it, like there’s some kind of conventionality in doing so
This is why you should just understand ら/ラ as “ら/ラ”.
The thing that complicates this topic is that not only isn’t there a single “r” sound in the non-Japanese languages, there is also not a single ら sound in Japanese (based on OUR interpretation of the sound). So it’s not like there’s one correct answer, and you can’t say it’s “in the middle”. From my perspective (Swedish language) there are definitely instances when it would be correctly transcribed as “r”, and other instances when it would be more accurate with “l”. Depending on speaker, situation, etc.
13 comments
Because it’s somewhere in the middle of the two and depending on your native language it can actually sound more to either side. Latin derived languages like spanish and italian use almost the exact same sound with their “R” and write it using that letter instead “L”.
Didn’t you mean ‘lomanji’?
I think it depends from the languages, it sure sounds a lot more like “l” in most languages.
The fact is that in japanese, we don’t have a sound close to “r”, japanese doesn’t need the use of the same muscle we use to speak english or french for example, so japanese people can’t pronounce “r”
But katakana is also use for phonetic, so anglicism will be writen in katakana, and in english words we have “r”, so the same character are use for “l” and “r”, since it sounds alike in japanese, and since they pronounce both the same way
That must be the reason why the person that made the romaji for the hiragana and katakana table (which mother tongue was english if I remember well) chose to put “r” besides “l”
I had to google to make it make more sense!
Romaji was invented in close relationships with Portuguese speaking priest around 1548.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with the rolled r that’s present in spanish, Portuguese, italien, etc. Well, it’s very close to the Japanese “r/l” sound and is pronounced at the front of the mouth.
The English r was not in their minds when they invented the romaji system so that’s why it seems like “r” is not close to the actual sound but “l” is.
However, for Portuguese speakers, their “r” sound is more accurate than the “l” sound.
Hope that makes sense! [here’s a wikipedia page about it ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese#:~:text=It%20was%20developed%20around%201548,learning%20to%20read%20Japanese%20orthography.)
Honestly I wouldn’t really say it sounds like an l or an r.
Regardless, English people attempting to write it down seem to have gone for those English letters and it has stuck. As long as you know that’s it’s ら that they’re referring to, I wouldn’t pay too much attention to romaji.
Maybe because I’m not a native English speaker but I’d say it hits pretty close to how I would pronounce an r sound. Like 来年 (らいねん) I’d certainly put that closer to an r sound than an l sound.
It sounds more like an r to me 🤔
like an r to me; can speak several european languages
Your response to Euffy is correct: ら is its own sound. It’s not a sound common to American English, which is one of the reasons why early learners of Japanese struggle with it. There’s a wikipedia page on the difference ([link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception_of_English_/r/_and_/l/_by_Japanese_speakers#:~:text=Japanese%20has%20one%20liquid%20phoneme,alveolar%20lateral%20approximant%20%5Bl%5D)). The page notes that the sound is variously heard as a “apico-alveolar tap [ɾ] and sometimes as an alveolar lateral approximant.” See the page itself for help with figuring out what those sounds are. My guess is that there is variation in Japanese itself that accounts for the difference sounds heard by linguists.
SirDeklan answered the question already, so all I can do is add to their post. When we come into contact with a sound that isn’t present in our own language, our minds approximate to a familiar sound. The Portuguese that SirDeklan referenced probably heard something like an /r/ or /l/ and did their best – they were probably either missionaries or merchants and may not have been interested in linguistic accuracy. Similarly, when learning English, many Japanese approximate our /th/ to a /t/. In cases of words like ‘time’ or names like ‘Tim’, many Japanese hear “chaimu” or “chimu”, and only when in language-learning settings (when language is often slowed down) do they perceive /ti/ instead of /chi/. English speakers, on the other hand, often don’t hear vowel lengths (e.g. tokyo vs. toukyo) that Japanese speakers discern normally and easily. I taught there a while back, and my Japanese colleagues and I would often tease one another on what we could hear and what we couldn’t from one another’s languages.
American English is actually extremely rare among world languages in that our R is what linguistics call a “rhotic” R, which is that “rrrrr” sound way in the back of your throat.
Very few languages have that, and in fact many local English dialects/accents have also evolved to drop the rhotic R because it’s so hard to say. (As an example, think Boston accent: “Pahk the cah in Hahvahd yahd.”)
Ironically, many regional accents in England itself, which invented English, don’t have rhotic R’s anymore either!
Instead, the rolled R, such as what you get in Spanish or Portuguese, which is closer to Japanese, is far more common across world languages. So it’s really the rhotic R that’s the odd man out in terms of picking what letter to use for romaji. Not the other way around.
As an italian, i must say it sounds way more like an “r” to me but then again there are of course italians who say otherwhise. Also it depends on regional variants, for example one philology professor used to say that in tokyoites you would probably hear an harsher “r”-like sound compared to people from some areas in Kansai, and yakuzas would purposefully try to make it sound more like “r” because “it sounds manlier”, whatever that means (at least that’s what he said).
I also noticed, but that may be my subjective impression, that in popular song lyrics they use “l” instead, in a way that to me sounds like their stressing it, like there’s some kind of conventionality in doing so
This is why you should just understand ら/ラ as “ら/ラ”.
The thing that complicates this topic is that not only isn’t there a single “r” sound in the non-Japanese languages, there is also not a single ら sound in Japanese (based on OUR interpretation of the sound). So it’s not like there’s one correct answer, and you can’t say it’s “in the middle”. From my perspective (Swedish language) there are definitely instances when it would be correctly transcribed as “r”, and other instances when it would be more accurate with “l”. Depending on speaker, situation, etc.