One of my regular readers will certainly understand this problem.

Of course, the solution is obvious: watch a lot of Dragon Ball Z and learn the way that Goku and Piccolo and Vegeta talk. Then you won't sound like a girl. (You'll sound like a lower-class anime roughneck, but at least you won't sound like a girl.)

UPDATE: When I was wondering about the word omigoto and asked about it, one of the reasons I was confused by it is that when Harumi says it, she largely omits the "g" sound. I had noticed that she also pronounced the proper name Moriguchi a bit strangely, changing the "g" sound and softening it a lot, making it sound like "ng".

I now wonder if she (or her seiyuu) was speaking with a Tohoku-ben. I just ran into a Wikipedia article on regional accents and it says:

In addition, all unvoiced stops become voiced intervocalically, rendering the pronunciation of the word "kato" (trained rabbit) as [kado]. However, unlike the high vowel neutralization, this does not result in new homophones, as all voiced stops are pre-nasalized, meaning that the word "kado" (corner) is roughly pronounced [kando]. This is particularly noticeable with the "g" sound, which is nasalized sufficiently that it sounds very much like the English "ng" as in "thing", with the stop of the hard "g" almost entirely lost.

That sounds like what I was hearing. But it's hard to believe that it was on purpose. It doesn't make sense for the character. She grew up in Tenmo, which is a fictional city located about where the real city of Odawara is, on the coast south-west of Tokyo. They wouldn't use a Tohoku-ben there, and no one else does that I've noticed. But I could have missed it. I don't have an ear for accents yet, at least to the point where I pick out consistent patterns. I notice the occasional -chama or -han distorted honorific, for example. But even though I know the two kids in Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi are speaking with an Osaka-ben, I couldn't tell you how it's different.

At the very least, no one else in Shingu does those strange things to their "g" sounds. That I do know.

I ran into that Wikipedia article because I was trying to make the point elsewhere that one reason the guy in that CS Monitor article was having trouble understanding the difference in male and female speech patterns was because he was also trying to untangle keigo and regional accents, and probably didn't have a big enough sample of distinct native speakers of all kinds to really pick out what was what. For instance, picking up edokko speech patterns wouldn't necessarily make him sound male; it would just make him sound uncultured and uneducated.

UPDATE: Harumi's seiyuu is Asano Masumi, who also did Saga in Sugar and Hakufu in Ikki Tousen. She was born in Akita, on the NW coast of Honshu. That's the heart of the Tohoku-ben.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Japanese at 02:18 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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