21411
In usages of あ after other syllables such as け or め, is the あ pronounced or
does it prolong the previous vowel's sound?

Taking the katakana spelling of "Mary": メアリー is that "Meh-ah-ri" or "Mehhh-ri"
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2015-01-22T17:18:35.807
21409
2016-08-03T23:40:18.670
2016-08-03T23:40:18.670
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question
pronunciation
Effects of あ after other vowel endings
The あ is pronounced separately, like "meh-ah-ri".1 This will always be the
case for sequences like メア, ケア, エア, etc.

For the most part, vowels in katakana loan words are only lengthened by the
vowel-lengthening mark "ー" (which I just learned is called 長音符【ちょうおんぷ】). For
example: アードバーク "aardvark", イーストウィック "Eastwick", 烏龍【ウーロン】 "Oolong", エース "ace",
オークション "auction".

Occasionally, you will see a repeated vowel used in katakana loan words to
indicate lengthening instead2 (like in hiragana), e.g. アア "aʻa".3 But you
won't ever see something like エア used to mean long /e/. That would have to be
エー or maybe エエ. The same holds true for all vowels, except for the exception
you probably already know, in which おう is usually pronounced as long /o/
rather than /ou/.

* * *

1 I'm sort of guessing here, but I suspect that the reason Mary is spelled
メアリー in katakana is that early transcriptions of the word were drawn from a
dialect of English that didn't have [the Mary-merry
merger](https://english.stackexchange.com/q/88115/43004) (or perhaps a time
before the merger even had begun anywhere?), so that the first vowel in the
word was actually a diphthong ("two vowels"): /ɛə/. The closest approximation
to that diphthong in Japanese is エア. If you were to transcribe "Mary" from a
dialect of English that did have the Mary-merry merger, I think you would
write it メーリー and pronounce it "mehhh-ri", as you put it.

2 Repeated vowels are pretty common when using katakana to write non-loan
words, though, e.g. [the names of plants and
animals](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/20840/3437).

3 A type of lava that is wonderful for Scrabble purposes. I would imagine the
use of アア rather than アー here is to indicate that the ア should be
rearticulated - in the original Hawaiian, it looks like there's a glottal stop
in the middle there.
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2015-01-22T21:45:41.547
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2015-01-22T21:45:41.547
2017-04-13T12:43:48.447
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answer