Often, I can't hear ん in words. Most recently I've seen this in 攻殻機動隊.
Examples:
もう少し詳しい検査をしてみないと何とも言えませんが、おそらく外的な要因は見つかりそうもありません... 要因 sounds like ようい
しくじれば、Spring-8の4倍の税金をかけた橋を… Sounds like ぜいき
何か途中から犯人のメッセージが一人称から三人称にすり替わってしまったような感じで I hear はんにん just fine, but then I hear いちにいしょう and さんにいしょう
総監暗殺予告の件で任意同行してもらうぜ！ 任意 sounds like にいい to me
The latter example I also heard in the drama お天気お姉さん(in episode 9).
- ①任意です｡②任意というには無理がありすぎる！ This is probably the single best example of it. I don't hear anything like someone intentionally trying to produce a sound(edit:That is, a sound between に and い in にんい).
So is this a silent letter? Is it a quirk that Japanese people are conscious of? Is it an accent? What allophone is this? Anything else I should know about it?
Thanks for the help!
Answer
ん has different pronunciations(allophones) depending on surrounding context.
- [m] before /p/, /b/ and /m/
- [n] before /d/, /t/, and /n/
- [ŋ] (What some might know as "ng") before [k] and [ɡ].
- [ɴ] at the end of prosodic units. This is close to [ŋ] but pronounced further down in the throat.
- Before vowels, /j/,/w/,/r/,/s/,/z/ and /h/, it is pronounced as a nasalized version of the preceding vowel.
This varies slightly based on speaker and register, but works as a general guideline. According to this, your example 税金を /ze:kiɴo/ would be pronounced
[~iĩo]
However, the nasality of the nasal vowels often tends to spread to the surrounding vowels by a phenomenon called "nasal assimilation". This causes the pronunciation to become
[~ĩ:õ]
Likewise, はんい would become
[hã:ĩ]
You mention in a comment that you don't hear anything nasal in it, but that might be because you're not used to listening for nasal vowels.
Finally, just to illustrate that nasal assimilation isn't a concept as alien as you might expect, it's quite common in English too. For example, the word "can't" is commonly pronounced [kã:t].
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