Talk:しかし

Pronunciation

@Fytcha, thanks for the double-check. I'm not sure if NHK has changed in the intervening years (I know there was an edition update somewhere along the line), but it definitely doesn't show 3 as devoiced now.

FWIW, in casual speech, I have a distinct sense that this often winds up sounding something like /ɕkaɕ/, depending on what follows. That said, I've also discovered that my sense of the language has been colored here and there by my geographical experiences (Morioka, Utsunomiya, Tokyo), leaving traces of regional idiosyncrasies.

@Shinji, you're a native speaker. Could you provide a sanity check? Is しかし pronounced with both し devoiced in certain contexts, or am I totally out in left field? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 17:40, 22 July 2022 (UTC)

@Eirikr: Thanks for the help! I'm not super educated about this topic so I could be wrong, but I think the mora where the downstep occurs cannot be devoiced, because otherwise how would the downstep (and with it, the pitch accent) manifest? Consequently, this may differ for regions where shikashi is not nakadaka, which includes pitch-accent-less dialects (which applies to Utsunomiya if this map is to be trusted). Also, listening a bit through YouGlish, it seems that the only instances where the final mora is devoiced is when a voiceless consonant immediately follows which, to me, seems more like a feature of connected speech rather than an inherent quality of the word. Tell me what you think! — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 17:04, 24 July 2022 (UTC)