Whispered vowel in Japanese

Wednesday 28 February 2024

How can a vowel be whispered, considering that vowels are voiced? Apparently by shaping your mouth in the correct way, and subsequently only breathing out. Amazingly that allows one to identify the intended vowel. I just tried this myself (so, no reference).

I tried this because I noticed that looking at the waveform of kikaina-o[dorokubeki-shokubutsu] the “whispered” vowel i in the first syllable of kikaina consisted mostly of silence. There is k, very short the rushing of air shaped like i and then silence. Also, k is very low in volume (I wanted to remove a bit of noise but it turned out the be part of the word).

I was most surprised by the silence in the word kikaina. Is there a stop after ki or becomes the whisper simply inaudible?

GT’s voice

Let’s check real voices:

kikaina hanashi desu naa (I used background noise reduction on this one)

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Ma, kikaina tokoro de ne. (Amazingly, ki looks like a separate word.)