Why is minna spelt みんな　みっな？

17 comments

1. っ is *not* consonant doubling, the transcription uses double consonants for gemination. The ん in みんな is one of the rare cases of an *actual* double consonant.

2. So you want to write みんあ?

3. Because it’s みんな *min na*, not みっな *min(pause)na*.

   Yes, the pronunciation is virtually identical in practice, but so are “hear” and “here”, yet they’re different words.

4. My guess is that it has the same sort of origin as こんにちは, where the な was once separate and made it a na-adjective but now is part of the word. Could be wrong tho

5. Because it’s not used to double letters. っ is used as a glottal stop. When you say みんな it’s one steady flow. If it was spelled みっな you’d have to say it as mi…na.

   Edit: *Ignore what I wrote and refer to the reply below.*

6. minna = mi(み) n(ん) na(な)

7. You may be thinking about this backwards. It’s not: you see double consonants in romaji, you use っ in Japanese. Rather it’s more like you see っ (pause for the mora/beat, as others have memtioned), you use double consonants in romaji to represent that. In other words, you derive romaji from Japanese, not Japanese from romaji.

   The Japanese term is “み • ん • な” (“mi • n • na”), no pause.

   Side note: みっな (“mi • (pause) • na”) seems like it would be really awkward to say (sounds robotic).

8. 皆様, don’t forget みな.

   (ETA: just in case, when used with -san or -sama, it’s actually pronounced mina)

9. It’s not the same sound. っ is a germination point or global stop. ん is literally just an N sound. みんな has an N sound. There are no っ followed by an N-row sound in native Japanese, also the R and W row as well and maybe some others. There are some in loanwords but not native Japanese ones.

10. っ can be thought of as holding your tongue in the position of the next consonant sound for one mora. That is not how you pronounce んな – though the romanization is misleading, ん and な are pronounced differently. ん starts as a nasal sound, and finishes differently depending on what the next consonant is. な just uses an n sound on the alveolar ridge, just like English n. The spelling みっな would not capture that nasal element, which is how the word is correctly pronounced.

11. As I always understood it the small つ is supposed to be a small pause before continuing to the next sillable while the ん in みんな is suposed to be read, it has a sound

12. A small つ is used as a pause inbetween sounds

13. The real answer is, it just is

    (っs does actually “double” the s, but you write double n’s as んn)

14. This is not how to think of Japanese, it is not a double consonant

15. Because n has it’s own hiragana in japanese. It’s that simple.

    You’re not saying mi-nna, you’re saying mi-n-na

    Note it isn’t a small ん (there’s no such thing) it’s a normal size ん, you’re just saying the n.

16. っ generally comes from earlier く、つ、ふ as in がく+こう=がっこう.

    ん usually comes from earlier ぬ、に、む、み etc. as in おみな -> おんな. Compounds are straightforward: さん+まい=さんまい.

    So, even if *おっな would hypothetically be pronounced the same as おんな, writing ん is simply etymologically and morphologically correct, and changing the spelling would serve no purpose other than to complicate matters.

    (In a few colloquial words like やっぱり and みんな the っ or ん just appeared “randomly”, but that’s a minor detail and shouldn’t influence regular spelling)

17. If we look at the histories of both ん and っ, and of sokuon, we have to look at historical kana usage.

    First, remember that the modern Japanese syllabaries are very recent. Reforms started in the late 19th century and were implemented only in 1946. Prior to c. 1900, kana was roughly divided into katakana, a relatively stable and standardized system created by Buddhist monks that used parts (片 kata) of kanji to purely represent sound. So, for example, from 加, often pronounced “ka”, the monks took the left half and created the katakana カ to represent the sound “ka”.

    The other system was curvier and more flowy. It was kanji, written in cursive, to represent sounds. The same kanji 加 appeared in these writings as か, and this letter also represented the sound “ka”. This system was viewed as more feminine, so it was often used to write women’s names, although many women also had names written in katakana as well.

    With this newer cursive system, however, the same sound could be represented by multiple cursive kanji. So, another way to write “ka” was the cursive of 可, which looks like の with a line on top. The possibilities weren’t endless, per se, but they were inconvenient to learn, since there could theoretically be over a hundred of these cursive characters to represent sounds.

    In 1900, the Japanese government said, “enough is enough,” and of the cursive forms created a standardized list of “hiragana”, and everything that fell outside of that list was called “hentaigana” and relegated only to a few women’s names. Interestingly, the oldest Japanese woman to ever live, Tanaka Kane (田中か子), arguably had a hentaigana in her given name, today represented by the kanji 子.

    Why the long story? Well, around this time, it was asked how to represent the modern nasal sound, which doesn’t follow the V / CV rule that all Japanese syllables have. Most people wrote む or ぬ and considered the nasal sound to just have a weak vowel, like the す in です and ます. In 1900, the government made one exception to this hentaigana rule, and used the cursive form of 武 (む) to represent mu, and the cursive form of 无 (ん)—a hentaigana of mu—to represent the nasal consonant. It’s not a coincidence that “te-form” for the n, m, and b columns end in んで, like 死んで, 読んで, and 選んで. It’s also not a coincidence that the negative ん is written (and pronounced) ぬ in highly formal contexts — like ませぬ. For all intents and purposes, the nasal syllable in Japanese is ん, whether you romanize it as n (minna), m (tempura), or n’ (tan’i).

    I had to do a little bit more reading on the sokuon letter っ. As another poster mentioned, historical kana spelling generally does not have this letter. 學校 was がくかう (gakukau), for example. (Again, く from the native perspective simply lost its full vowel sound and geminated with the following か from the k column.) I have read texts from before 1946 that use a full size つ or ツ to represent the sokuon in native words, like であつた or デアツタ for “de atta”, but this makes sense because, again, つ here is seen as just losing its vowel prior to another kana from the t column.

    The gemination phenomenon arguably happens most with “stops” (sounds your mouth makes by stopping airflow) like t, k, and p. If you pronounce “hot pocket” and listen to yourself, chances are you won’t really hear the t in “hot”. It may come out as “hoppocket” or “ho’pocket” (like a glottal stop).

    Similarly, if you tried to pronounce Middle Chinese “sit-bai” (失敗) or Ainu “sat-poro” (札幌), you’d likely find your mouth naturally wants to swap out that t for a p (sip-bai, sap-poro) or maybe a glottal stop. Because of this phenomenon, sit-bai became しっぱい, and sat-poro became さっぽろ. After 1946, the rule was made that these *non-nasal stops* should be geminated using a small っ or ッ. Language evolves, and as others have mentioned, that character sometimes now represents glottal stops or can be found in loan words that geminate sounds that are not stops, like the long h in ファン・ホッホ (van Gogh). But for the nasals (n and m columns), the hentaigana-turned-hiragana ん already exists, making っ essentially unnecessary.