watashi ha gakusei desu

why is japanese は pronounced wa? — by mati ★

← back to marticles

this article was written really fast.

it is finished, though. it's just that there's a few disconnects, but it should be mostly (like more than 90%) understandable if you know some japanese. i'll probably revise it later.

so, if you speak japanese, you know that the particle は isn't pronounced ha, but wa. but have you ever wondered why? because it's not just は. there's also へ, pronounced e (not he) and を, pronounced o (not wo). there's also the word 言う, but i'll talk about that later.

fa, fi, fu, fe, fo

so, here's a thing: the series of sounds in japanese that goes ha, hi, fu, he, ho (は・ひ・ふ・へ・ほ) nowadays actually used to be fa, fi, fu, fe, fo. you can see this in the nippo jisho (日葡辞書, 'japanese-portuguese dictionary') of 1603 that the portuguese missionaries in japan wrote — words that nowadays have the sound ha, for example, are all spelled fa, indicating that they were pronounced with the same sound as modern ふ fu.

the sound of the consonant in fu in japanese (or of the fa, fi... that shows up in loanwords, like ファッション fasshon) isn't the same sound as the english f, which is [f], a sound pronounced with your lips + teeth. it's a bilabial sound — pronounced by letting the air pass through both of your lips: [ɸ].

why isn't 藤原, ふじはら?

so, the thing about a bilabial [ɸ] sound is that in the middle of words, back in the early middle japanese days (if i'm not mistaken), it already started becoming a little bit unstable. another sound that's pronounced with your lips is [w] (that's just the regular w sound as in wine), and [ɸ] in the middle of a word in japanese started weakening to [w].

let's look at a few examples of this:
(the "word" column is in modern spelling, in cases where it might be different from the traditional kyūjitai version. 帰る was spelled 歸る back in the day, for example.)

word older form newer form
かは kafa かわ kawa
哀れ あはれ afare あわれ aware
帰る かへる kaheru kaweru (> かえる kaeru)

this sound change generally did not affect compounds, hence 後輩, for example, is still こうはい and not *こうわい, but in the case of the last name 藤原, literally 'field of wisterias', this sound change did affect it, because it wasn't seen as a compound anymore. so from 藤 (ふじ) + 原 (はら), you get ふじはら (then fuzifara), which later became ふじわら.

how this affected the particle は

so, は is a particle, right? this means that it's always attached to a previous word, like 私は, テーブルは, 学生は..., and that means that it's phonetically pronounced as if it was one word with the thing that comes before it. this made it be affected by the change that turned f into w in the middle of a word, and so は, then fa, never became *ha. it became wa, because it was always in the middle of a word. this also affected へ, which at this stage has progressed from fe to we. the change to e needs another explanation that's coming later.

also, note the spelling of は did not change, unlike the spelling of かわ, あわれ and countless other words. they kept the spelling in the post world war two spelling reform, because the word was seen as too common to have its spelling changed. you'll see this with two other particles in the next section, too.

wi and ゑ we

— also wo, but that one's more complicated.

so, to explain へ e, you have to notice something about japanese. you can have wa sounds just fine. one of the first words you learn, after all, is watashi 'i'. but, except for foreign words like ウォッカ wokka 'vodka' and ウィンク winku 'wink', you can't have w followed by any of the other four vowels (i, u, e or o). well, it used to be possible in middle japanese, but w just disappeared before those vowels in a historic process. this is why the w that you see in the word 上着 uwagi 'coat' isn't there in 上 ue 'top'. or why 声 koe has no w, but there is a w in 声色 kowairo. ue and koe used to be uwe and kowe, but the w disappeared over time, so it's not there anymore.

you can even see this in the way that certain verbs are conjugated. if you've ever noticed something about verbs that end in the kana う u (not the sound u, all verbs end in that!), you'll notice something about the negative ~ない -nai form. because you see, to make the -nai form of an -u verb in japanese, you have to first remove the -u from the verb, then you'll get the stem, and then you add -anai. here's some examples:

note: the hyphens are just to show morpheme boundaries. they aren't spelled in the original script or pronounced.

dictionary form stem (remove the u) negative form (add -anai)
書く kaku writes kak- 書かない kak-anai doesn't write
待つ matsu¹ waits mat- 待たない mat-anai doesn't wait
読む yomu reads yom- 読まない yom-anai doesn't read

¹tsu in japanese is a sound change from an underlying tu, that's why the stem isn't *mats-.

see how they all follow the same pattern? but now let's look at these ↓ verbs, that end in the kanau. in other words, this means they end in vowel + u, like au, or ou.

dictionary form stem (remove the u) negative form (add -anai)
洗う arau washes araw- 洗わない araw-anai doesn't wash
払う harau pays haraw- 払わない haraw-anai doesn't pay

— wait, what the hell's happening here? why is there a w there?
so, the thing here is that these verbs used to end in -fu. arafu, farafu. but over time, the fu changed to wu, and since wu is really annoying to pronounce, that changed to u. and so did the other forms of these verbs, like 洗える araeru 'can wash', because w disappeared before all vowels, except a. so you have arau and araeru, and also araimasu and all the other forms of this verb, but arawanai and arawazu ni, because the w stayed in its place before a.

now getting back to へ e, this is what made it turn from we (< earlier even fe) to e. this is also what turned を wo into o. once again, just like は wa, the spellings were kept as へ (lit. he) and を (lit. wo) because these words were felt as being too common to have their spellings updated.

言う iu, the weird verb that ends in う u

the word 言う, when spelled out in kana, is いう iu. it's even almost always spelled in kana when you say stuff like こういう kō iu and ~という ... to iu. but that is not how it's pronounced. you'll always hear it pronounced , as if spelled ゆう.

there's a reason for this. saying [イウ] i-u is kind of hard. at least that's what the japanese thought back in the middle japanese days, so they started saying [ユー] . this happened to other words with iu sequences, like the old word for cucumber, きうり kiuri. nowadays it's not kiuri anymore, but きゅうり kyūri. same for the word for 'ten', now 十 , but once jiu (= ziu), and earlier even zifu.

you might be asking yourself now though:
— if the word is usually spelled with kanji, like 言う, then doesn't that mean that they could've changed the spelling to ゆう without that many problems?

and you would be right, but the reason that いう is still spelled like that isn't historical spelling, or a desire to keep the old orthography. it's analogy, because the other forms of the verb, like いわない, いった, いって..., are all still pronounced with an i sound. or are they?

some people say ゆった for 言った

so, yeah, the standard pronunciation, used both formally and informally for the forms of 言う is with /i/ for all the other forms, like 言わない and 言った. except that informally, depending on dialect and such, you'll hear people saying 言った as [ユッタ], or 言って as [ユッテ]. the reason for this is quite simple, and it's because if the base form of the verb is pronounced [ユー], you'd be inclined to think that it conjugates like any other verb ending in uu. think 救う sukuu, 'to rescue'. sukuwanai, sukutte and so on. hence yutta, yutte (it's most common with these two forms. people don't really say yuwanai that often.)

the end

so, this is it! i hope you've learned something about the history of japanese spelling and the sounds of japanese, and that you have something to tell your equally nerdy friends, or even your friends from japan, about.

until next time! ^^

Edit
Pub: 06 Dec 2023 20:34 UTC
Edit: 30 Jan 2024 15:08 UTC
Views: 490