This reminds me of when I met some Irish people in Spain.
They were pronouncing the words “house” and “now” like hois and noi (like noise).
That felt so weird to me.
Italians use the former (which btw is also an Italian word meaning monk).
In my experience French people use the latter.
Second O is a little stronger than the first one, which to an Italian speaker sounds exactly like having an accent on it: Monacó.
No, that’s Japanese!!!
I can’t read that symbol, but funny thing is that Italian word for Japan is Giappone which has the same starting sound: English ja sounds like Italian gia.
I’m many times confused when i go pay in local shops because it’s not always obvious to differentiate 4 (se) and 10 (shi) and then 14 or 40 or 44… Not only me but chinese tourists too.
I’d assume it’s because ba is closer in its articulation to a fricative. It’s a plosive, but as far as the prosody is concerned they’re both obtrusive to the airflow and their articulatory position is similar enough to make the surrounding vowels sound nearly identical. Having said that given the convoluted history of the japanese language it could also have something to do with the previous iterations of the phonology, because afaik it’s known that japanese used to be pronounced quite differently in the past (much closer to the ainu language iirc).
They’re related through the fact that they were living on the same land. In fact the majority of the cities/rivers/mountains on the north of japan (esp. hokkaido) are named using ainu or ainu-ish words. South of there you’d have normal readings and normal names for places, meanwhile even the “capital” of hokkaido (sapporo) has an ainu origin, so it doesn’t “make sense” to the natives. The languages were undeniably under heavy mutual influence for hundreds of years, even though they’re unrelated linguistically. It’s a similar situation with russia and baltic languages actually - it’s even argued that “moscow” (moskva) is a baltic origin word, as well as most of the surrounding points of interests having an obvious balto-finnic origin.
In Latin and several other European IE languages, b is related to v/w. For example in Greek, the pronunciation of “b” changed from /b/ to /v/ long ago. And in Spanish, many "v"s have been replaced by "b"s, although that “b” is prononounced more like a “v/w” when between vowels. For example in “caballo” /kawajo/ = horse. That was probably even the case in Latin, “habere”/hawere/ = “have” and this is still the case in some Italian dialects.
I know that, but I’m not convinced that being neighbours leads to resemblance in phonology. Rather the opposite seems accurate, since it’s what happens with languages that are closely related: phonology tends to drift apart.
It should also be mentioned that Ainu, like Japanese, also has no “v” sound, so in context, the historical phonology seems irrelevant.
Quite correct.
A teacher at school once told us that they had found a reference about the sound of sheep and it was written as “βεε βεε” or something. Modern writting of that would be “μπεε μπεε” (modern … well, last 2000 years ) to refer to that hard b sound.
Now, as the teacher aptly put it, “either the sheep collectively started to bleat in a different way or the letter changed the sound it expressed” … noone knows why that happened though. Maybe the addition of a softer “v” sound was needed and they shifted the hard “b” to “mp”? We’d need a time machine for that alas.
Even without a time machine, there is evidence that the Greek letter “β” was pronounced as /b/ in classical times (besides the fact that the symbol derives from the Phoenician letter for /b/, as does the Latin letter “B”).
In the centuries around the year 0, there was close contact between Greek and Latin. There are various cognates between the languages and there are cases where Latin words were written in Greek and vice versa. These give hints about the pronunciation of different letters at the time. For example, Latin words or cognates with a “v”/w/ were sometimes written in old greek as “ϝ(digamma/wau)”/w/ and not as “β”, suggesting that “β” was not pronounced as /v/ yet, so they wouldn’t write /v/ or /w/ as “β”.
) to refer to that hard b sound.