How does Japanese have double consonants if it has no syllable endings with consonants except for n?

How does words like chotto and matte come to being if there is no syllable structure as CVC (except for n)?

11 comments
  1. Most linguists analyze them to have a coda represented as an archiphoneme /Q/, which is a consonant whose feature values are fed by the next consonant. Under this analysis the CVC structure can be CVQ or CVN.

    I personally analyze those “double consonants” as just regular long consonants.

  2. Because of the つ / ツ / tsu symbol.

    When written as a standard sized character like that, it just means tsu. Like in tsunami.

    But when written slightly smaller like きっぷ it doesn’t say tsu but instead doubles the consonant of the next character. So instead of kitsupu, you read it as kippu.

  3. It’s not CVC, it’s CCV. The doubling as we know it in English creates something akin to a silent glottal stop.

  4. Think of the consonant doubling as being at the beginning of a syllable.

    Example: 切手 (きって). The consonant that’s doubled is the t at the beginning of “te”.

  5. To begin with, you’re approaching it with a European language-based syllable approach, when Japanese more accurately uses mora.

    When asked about syllables, the average Japanese person (i.e. one who equates syllables and mora) may well claim that ‘ん’ is in and of itself a syllable, e.g. ‘新聞’ isn’t ‘shin/bun’, it’s ‘shi/n/bu/n’, 4 instead of 2. Which isn’t correct, obviously, but it’s an easy mistake to make, because kana is a ‘syllabary’ and therefore every character in it should theoretically be a ‘syllable’.

    So why is it that ん is a character in a syllabary, is said with the same timing as every other character (this is an important point; Japanese kana, including ん, are more or less isochronic), and is more or less treated the same as any other character by Japanese speakers, despite the fact that it is according to you ‘a syllable ending consonant’? Because Japanese doesn’t revolve around syllables, it revolves around morae, and while you can extrapolate syllables from morae, this is less intuitive than just counting in morae.

  6. Gemination is a permitted coda in Japanese. We usually express it with a capital /Q/ in Japanese phonology. So the answer is rather simple: Japanese allows two codas, the nasal /N/ and the geminate /Q/. Reports that Japanese permits no codas are greatly exaggerated.

  7. Think of the double consonant as a quick stop in the word rather than a double consonant. I think someone mentioned earlier that in Japanese it’s written as a small つ, but in English transcription that’s replaced with doubling the consonant it comes in front of. If you use ^ to replace the double consonant and represent a quick stop, it’s easier to see in words like cho^ to and ma^ te have that stop rather than an actual double consonant.

  8. I don’t think I understand any of the question or answer… but don’t all languages have double consonants? Apple? Battle? Annoying?

    You don’t pronounce ‘ah-pul’ you do say ‘ap-pull’ and ‘ba-tul’ ‘bat-tul’. There’s a stop of breath after that first consonant and before the second.

    Like Japanese you say mat-te where there is a stop on the t. Not ma-te.

  9. Because they’re not really double consonants. The romaji just uses double consonants because there’s no good symbol to represent a glottal stop sound, which is what you’re referring to. Research the glottal stop sound!

  10. Regarding chotto and matte, those double consonances are actually “glottal strokes”.

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