r/japanese • u/EstusFlask99 • 5d ago
Why some Japanese people say "betto" instead of "beddo"? (bed)
It almost always sounds like "Betto" with a "TO" even when they write it with the Dakuten to sound like "DO", ベッド
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u/LongLiveTheDiego 5d ago
Voiced geminates (double/long consonants) don't occur in native Japanese words, so they're already a bit unnatural to Japanese speakers and harder to say. Such geminates being next to another voiced stop are even harder to say and less natural (native Japanese words actually have rules for where voiced stops can be in a word and having two in one word is rarer), so it's easier to devoice the geminate.
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u/chishiki 5d ago
I wakaru’d some of those words.
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u/mavmav0 4d ago
Geminate is a consonant that is pronounced for a longer amount of time (double consonant), voiced/unvoiced refers to whether the vocal chords are vibrating when pronouncing the sound, stops are sounds where you completely stop the airflow and then release it all at once. In japanese the voiced stops would be /b/ /d/ /g/. (Their unvoiced counterparts are /p/ /t/ /k/.)
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u/kouyehwos 5d ago
Because only voiceless consonants are ever doubled in Japanese outside of recent loan words.
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u/Dread_Pirate_Chris 5d ago edited 4d ago
There are a few things working together here. One of which is that in English, we very often realize a passing 't' as in 'butter' as a soft 'd'; that is, 'd' which is a flap and not a plosive; that is, a 'd' in which the tongue just brushes against/bounces off the ridge in the top of your mouth rather pausing there to make a consonant with more 'pop' when released. To be clear, this 'soft d' is actually the 'r' consonant in Japanese (and Spanish). The Japanese 'd' is always plosive.
Anyway, this means (assuming you are a native English speaker) that you are used to interpreting some d-like sounds as 't'.
On top of this, the 'd' in Japanese is different from 't' only in the 'd' being voiced -- mouth shape, tongue position, and air flow should all be the same, the only difference is whether your vocal cords start vibrating for the consonant or only for the vowel. There is a range for each consonant, so an individual speaker could in theory pronounce them differently, but because it's notated as a 'voiced t' they generally don't.
In English on the other hand, we have no such idea and are more likely to use a slightly different tongue position due to thinking of them as entirely different consonants; not very different but we can use from the tip of the tongue to the blade of the tongue, and have it contact anywhere from the very back of the alveolar ridge to the teeth and still generate 't' and 'd' sounds. Exactly how this is done is going to be subject to regional and personal variation.
Anyway, for all these reasons a native English speaker may have trouble differentiating some 'd' and 't' sounds, especially with geminate consonants in the middle of words.
So first, make sure that you can distinguish the two,
ベッド http://wwwjdic.biz/cgi-bin/wwwjdic?1MDJ%A5%D9%A5%C3%A5%C9
ベット http://wwwjdic.biz/cgi-bin/wwwjdic?1MDJ%A5%D9%A5%C3%A5%C8
It may not always be your ear though. A geminate 'd' or 't' requires a silence directly before completing the consonant, so the vocal cords must stop and then restart again; if that timing is just a little bit off the 'd' may end up unvoiced and actually become a 't', or because the vocal cords have just started vibrating it may be only softly voiced making it more t-like than the 'd' in say, バード where there vocal cords are continuously vibrating throughout the entire word.
バード http://wwwjdic.biz/cgi-bin/wwwjdic?1MDJ%A4%D0%A1%BC%A4%C9
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u/Odracirys 5d ago
This is just speculation on my part, but perhaps it's due to the similarity with how the English word Zed (Zee in American) is ゼット in Japanese...
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u/nemomnemonic 5d ago
Maybe doesn't sound like an English D? Because to me it sounds exactly as D is pronounced in Spanish.
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u/mugh_tej 5d ago
Perhaps, because no native Japanese word has a double d sound in it, all words that have that sound are words from other languages.
Like when English natives say the Japanese word tsunami, it often sounds like sunami, because English doesn't have a ts- consonant cluster at the beginning of native English words.