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Recently, I've been using Siri in Japanese to set cooking timers. I've noticed
she pronounced the「フ」in「十五分」clearly as /hu/, not /fu/.

_From Wikipedia:_

> Old Japanese does not have /h/, but rather /ɸ/ (preserved in modern fu,
> /ɸɯ/), which has been reconstructed to an earlier /*p/.

_[Also from Wikipedia:](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu_%28kana%29)_

> It represents the phoneme /hu͍/, although for phonological reasons, the
> actual pronunciation is [ɸu͍].

The sound sample in the Wikipedia article does sound more like /fu/.

While I understand it's basically the same phoneme for the Japanese, I do hear
the difference. Hence the question.

Is the Siri's variant acceptable?
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2014-01-06T19:21:09.623
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2014-03-26T15:33:17.827
2014-03-26T15:33:17.827
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question
phonetics
Siri's pronunciation of ふ
Well, I can again only speculate, but if they say it did not have `/h/` but
had `/ɸ/` and nowadays it have `/h/`, it have probably evolved from that
`/ɸ/`. When _I_ played with my mouth and tried to say /hɯ/, with stiff lips as
the Japanese /ɯ/ is to be pronounced, than I get a sound which resembles
rather /ɸɯ/. So, maybe it is ok to try to say /hɯ/, you say /ɸɯ/ anyway, if
you are a living human being, just Siri isn't ;-)

But that's just my speculations.
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2014-01-06T22:14:45.760
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2014-01-06T22:14:45.760
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answer