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Originally Posted by Sstupid I don't think Japanese language has pronunciation of voiceless sounds pronounced independantly except for sh. (I am not sure, though.)
Can we say Japanese has voiceless sounds in such a case? |
In words like, say,
shite (do), pronounced as
shte, wherein the vowel is elided, or omitted is evidence of a process called palatalization. Both "sh" and "i" share the feature [high], or rather the same place of articulation, so the vowel's phonetic contribution is redundant. The same is true with a voiced initial consonant (e.g., zhite => zhte). Palatalization is a universal process. It's found in Russia, Portuguese, and many other languages, including Japanese.
As for "Voicing", all human language, be they syllabic or not, have voiceless sounds. A distinction is made between voiced and voicless sounds, and Japanese is not an exception. They are called contrastive sounds (e.g., p and b, t and d, s and z, and so on). With syllabic languages, since the segments are consonant-vowel pairs, it's often the case that speakers will pre-voice the consonantal part of the segment in anticipation of the vowel part of that segment (i.e., onset timing).
That is, vibration begins mid-way through the pronunciation of the voiceless consonant, making it appear as if the consonant is itself voiced. But that's not the reality of it, physiologically speaking. "t" is voicless, and we know this because it is
contrastive:
tai (party, company, band; sea bream)
dai (subject, theme, title; stand, rest)
If "t" were voiced, then "tai" and "dai" would be pronounced the same, and yet they are not, are they?
"t" is voiceless and "d" is voiced. They are contrastive, and that's why we know they are different.