@Vampyricon: I am confused about what "Failed verification for phonemic syllabification in Japanese" means. The example [ɲiɰ̃.i] is phonetic brackets, not phonemic slashes. Was there some discussion elsewhere that I missed? I think that this page should include the syllable division marker, because it can occasionally be useful to use it in phonetic transcriptions of Japanese to make a point about syllabification. For example, it is used on the page Japanese phonology in the section discussing the moraic nasal (to emphasize the difference in syllabification between [kaɰ̃.a.ke], [kaɰ̃.juː] versus [ka.na.ke], [ka.ɲuː]) and in the section discussing rearticulated vowel sequences (to emphasize the difference in syllabification between [sɯꜜːɾi] and [sɯꜜ.ɯɾi]). So I think [.] should be listed on the key here. That's not saying that it is mandatory to use it: compare Help:IPA/English, which has the note "the IPA dot ⟨.⟩ may be used when it is wished to make explicit where a division between syllables is (or may be) made." Urszag (talk) 17:49, 4 August 2025 (UTC)
- The problem is that (afaict) every heterosyllabic sequence has a homosyllabic variant, meaning they are mere variants of each other and aren't phonemic. Syllables are inherently phonemic constructs, so if syllabification is not phonemic, then it's irrelevant to the language. This is especially true when all of those examples have additional distinguishing factors that can be much more easily argued to be the phonemic component, e.g. the moraic nasal takes up a mora, so [kaɰ̃ake] is tetramoraic whereas [kanake] is trimoraic, and [sɯꜜːɾi] contrasts with [sɯꜜːꜛɾi] due to the morpheme boundary and thus pitch accents. I'm perfectly happy to add it in if you can quote where the sources in the main page they state syllabification to be an element of the language though. Vampyricon (talk) 18:32, 4 August 2025 (UTC)
- I've cited several sources in Japanese_phonology#Syllables that treat syllables as part of the prosodic structure of Japanese. This is different from saying that syllabification is phonemic: compare how stress can exist as a prosodic feature even in a language that has predictable rather than lexically contrastive stress placement. Kubozono 2015 "Introduction to Japanese phonetics and phonology", in Kubozono, Haruo (ed.), Handbook of Japanese Phonetics and Phonology, Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 1–40, is one of the sources that explicitly discusses the argument about whether syllables are relevant in Japanese, and says, e.g. "In Tokyo Japanese, the syllable plays somewhat subsidiary roles, but there are many phenomena in which the bimoraic monosyllables pattern with monomoraic monosyllables and not with bimoraic disyllabic words" (p. 19), mentioning some aspects of accentuation and truncation processes. Kubozono also made the choice as an editor to have the transcriptions in this book use [.] to mark syllable boundaries (as noted on page 4), so that's relevant precedence for its use in linguistic discussions of Japanese.--Urszag (talk) 18:57, 4 August 2025 (UTC)
- Okay. Feel free to change that part back then! Vampyricon (talk) 21:00, 4 August 2025 (UTC)
