42279
In several sources it's mentioned that a SMALL TSU doubles consonants. My
problem is, some websites give almost identical examples with:

っ/ッ + (S, T, C, K, G, B, P)

But what about the others?:

っ/ッ + (M, N, V, W ...)

When I use some online converter (Kana>Romaji), they double all of them.

So, does a SMALL TSU double all consonants or not? And if not, in which cases?
CC BY-SA 4.0
2017-01-05T08:15:57.683
42277
2022-01-24T23:59:19.107
2022-01-24T23:59:19.107
30454
19301
question
katakana hiragana rōmaji
Does a small tsu double all consonants?
For one thing, [v] is not a legitimate consonant in native Japanese. You may
see it used in loanwords, but the pronunciation varies between speakers; some
native speakers, especially younger generations, pronounce it as a [v], but
some people still pronounce it as a [b], which is what has historically been
used in Japanese to approximate a [v] sound. So it falls into the same
category as [b].

For M, っ is not used; instead a ん is used preceding it; so "hammer" is written
as ハンマー, not *ハッマー. This is also the case for N. As for W, there are no native
words (that I'm aware of) that use a geminate [w] sound, and I actually can't
think of a word in any language that would end up being transcribed in such a
way that you would need to, but I suppose it wouldn't be incorrect to use a っ
with it.
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-01-05T08:31:47.803
42278
2017-01-05T08:31:47.803
9596
42277
answer
A small tsu (sokuon) geminates (doubles) the following consonant. In native
vocabulary, only unvoiced consonants can be geminated. This includes the さ, た,
か, and ぱ rows. A double n as in おんな is not really pronounced the same way as
＊おっな would be if it were a word.

In loanwords that require gemination of other consonants, N tends to use ン, M
uses ン or ム, W uses ウ, and others use the -u form of their row. Some examples
are:

  * homemade → ホームメード
  * comma → コンマ
  * whistleblower → ホイッスルブロウワー
  * role-playing game → ロウルプレイングゲーム

Some loanwords do use the sokuon where native words would not, such as:

  * big → ビッグ
  * badge → バッジ

The important thing is that these are all loanwords. You generally won't see
such examples written in hiragana, though the sokuon is used the same way in
either writing system.

You may also see the small tsu at the end of a word or sentence. There it
represents a glottal stop, an abrupt ending.
CC BY-SA 4.0
2017-01-05T08:48:18.353
42279
2018-06-16T09:41:04.170
2018-06-16T09:41:04.170
19303
19303
42277
answer
The small つ (written as っ) is used to represent a very brief pause before the
next consonant. These occur in the readings of Kanji and in hiragana
grammatical conjugations. This is Romanised as a double consonant and used to
represent them (with ッ) in foreign words. The reason that つ is used is that
"tsu" sounds are often replaced with pauses in compound words. This is similar
to the voicing of second Kanji in compound words (such as [川]{river} being
read as かわ or がわ in different words).

For example, use in grammatical conjugations:

> りんごを買{か}った

> I bought the Apple

> 美味{おい}しかったです

> It was delicious

> 待{ま}ってください

> Please wait

Use in Kanji readings:

> 出発{しゅっぱつ}

> Departure

> 札幌{さっぽろ}

> Sapporo (City)

> 北海道{ほっかいどう}

> Hokkaido (Island/Prefecture)

This pause is also used for sudden stops in conversational speech:

> あっ！

> Aha!

> えっ？

> Really?

Since the sound following depends on the next Kanji, not they one preceding
it, the っ could occur before any sound that occurs native in Japanese
(including voiced consonants G, Z, J and yoon syllables). However, notice that
Fa, Fi, Fe, C, V, and Wi do not occur natively in Japanese and are only used
in foreign names (or very recent loanwords).

Note that while っ is romanised as a double consonant, it is _often_ not
pronounced this way, although the following consonant may be stressed. See
[this answer](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/80634/40411) for more
details.
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-06-16T11:31:24.363
59493
2020-12-14T14:47:36.953
2020-12-14T14:47:36.953
14608
14608
42277
answer
Tom Kelly's response is downvoted, but is actually more correct than any other
phonologically speaking, but still not the entire story so I'll elaborate on
it and will show an audio analysis comparing it with true gemination so that
the difference be visible.

The _sokuon_ in Japanese maps to what Japanese speakers perceive as a coherent
atomic unit of sound [phoneme] which is probably why it is written with a
single symbol — the Japanese do not consider it merely an orthographical quirk
but an actual consonant of Japanese. Such a phoneme is called an
_archiphoneme_ , a rare type of phoneme that lacks a consistent underlying
place and method of articulation. That is to say that Japanese speakers
perceive it as it's own consonant, but it has no meaningful way to be
pronounced in isolation. /k/ as in the start of “ **c** oal” is a phoneme in
English, but English speakers can pronounce it in isolation on command.
Archiphonemes are indeed quite rare in languages, and English lacks them
entirely. This phoneme is conventionally denoted as /Q/ with a capital letter
as conventional for denoting Archiphonemes.

Like most archiphonemes, the distribution of this phoneme is very limited;
within the Tokyo standard dialect it can only occur after a vowel, and before
any of /t, p, k, s/. This phoneme however must still be _realized_ in some way
and make a difference in pronunciation; this is where archiphonemes become
interesting, because they are typically realized by their effect on
surrounding phonemes, which is why their distribution is so limited.

Now, it is often said that /Q/ is realized by geminating the following
consonant. This is only arguably true in the case of /s/ where for a fricative
“geminating” is a very abstract term since fricatives can be held indefinitely
unlike plosives; when /Q/ is followed by /s/ it is indeed realized simply by
holding /s/ for the length of an extra mora.

The sequences of /Qt, Qp, Qk/ are not realized in Japanese by geminating the
following consonant; this is something that is repeated very often in lay
literature and even some specialized literature but is absolutely false and
I'll show why. It is realized by a mora of silence in this case; this also
maps onto the perception of /Q/ by Japanese speakers who often claim to
perceive it as an empty phoneme of silence for a mora. This goes back it being
a consonant; it is effectively “a consonant of silence”.

Onto the audio analysis comparison:

[![JP vs
Fin](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fv0rq.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fv0rq.jpg)

The top two are from a Japanese rendition of “ちょっと”; the speaker
Strawberrybrown collected from
[here](https://forvo.com/word/%E3%81%A1%E3%82%87%E3%81%A3%E3%81%A8/#ja); the
bottom two are from the Finnish word “että” collected from the speaker Koobee
[here](https://forvo.com/word/ett%C3%A4/#fi).

It is obvious that in “että”, there is a small amplitude spike before the
“tä” that is lacking in “ちょっと”, but that is not all, in the spectrogram there
is also a small thin dark vertical line in the same place that is indicative
of a plosive sound. There is no doubt that in Finnish there truly are two
plosives, in this case two [t] sounds that occur in succession as you will
also find in Arabic, Latin, or any other language with true consonant
gemination.

This is missing in Japanese, there is nothing, no fricative, no vowel, no
plosive, there is simply a mora of relative silence before the /t/, which does
show the characteristic dark, then vertical band. You can verify yourself that
this is reproducible with any Japanese word that features /Qt, Qp, Qk/ — the
/Q/ archiphoneme, commonly called the “moraic obstruent” if you wish to learn
more about it, is not realized in Japanese by doubling plosives, this is a
myth that is very common, even in some specialized literature.

Now, onto the /Qs/ combination however for completeness' sake:

[![enter image description
here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Z5GL7.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Z5GL7.jpg)

This is SPCyan's pronunciation from
[here](https://forvo.com/word/%E3%81%82%E3%81%A3%E3%81%95%E3%82%8A/#ja).

As you can see, there is no silence here; the pattern on the spectrogram shows
that the fricative in /aQsari/ is simply stretched and forms one long pattern
on a spectogram that is consistent with a fricative. Nevertheless, it is also
visible that it's a less loud and dense fricative than from where the real /s/
starts and more frequencies become filled in, so that's an interesting thing.

But at the end of the day, despite <っ> being conventionally romanized as a
doubled consonant it “doubles” no consonant; it's realized as a moral of
silence before /k, p, t/ and it only stretches /s/ — it cannot occur in the
standard dialect before any other sound but in some dialects it can occur more
freely where the realization becomes even more varied.

_P.S._ : more I incidentally lately came across a a [piece of
research](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289606717_Perception_of_the_moraic_obstruent_Q_A_cross-
linguistic_study) which investigates the perception of /Qs/ by Japanese native
speakers and concludes that they have a hard time differentiating the normal
realization from a true mora of silence, which provides evidence that to
Japanese speakers, the underlying form is indeed a mora of silence, not a
gemination.
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-09-13T05:57:52.333
80634
2021-04-15T12:50:53.440
2021-04-15T12:50:53.440
35937
35937
42277
answer