無印 Muji

[Michaelyus]

Warning: armchair linguistics below. You have been warned.

 

 

As a native speaker of London English (relatively Estuary, with hints of RP), non-native (slightly British English-tinged) French, a strongly southern mainland accent in my (heritage) Mandarin, and simply non-native (tinged with archaic 鄉音) Cantonese:

 

• "See east" and "see yeast" are for me distinguished even in fast speech. They are of course a minimal pair for /j/, which for me is usually rather voiced, and creates a glide into /iː/, resulting in [jɪiː]. In allegro, I think I insert a glottal stop into "see east", whilst I'm not sure whether I maintain voicing or whether devoice the /j/ consistently. I have a feeling that stress may play a part whether I go for the glottal stop or whether I end with liaison, which I do more often in slow speech.
• "loo ooze" and "loo wooing" feel closer, and are distinguished mainly by my glottal stop in the former. I'd hardly use liaison here.
• Side note: my /uː/ is rather fronted and opened. Not fronted quite as much as Scottish English (or even modern standard Swedish) which has [ʉː], but what Wikipedia says about RP's realisation as [ɵu̯] doesn't feel wrong. That may be why my assimilated /w/ is "weakened" in terms of making the contrast.

 

• I tend to separate vowels in Mandarin with a glottal stop as well, and I generally start all utterances that begin with vowels with a glottal stop. It gets more pronounced in fast speech, I feel.
• This may extend in fast speech to all vowel-initial (and that goes for yi- and wu- and yu-) syllables, especially at the beginning of sense groups. But even if there's a nasal final before it, I nasalise it quite heavily, so that glottal stop is retained.
• Subjectively, I feel I make a difference between an ending glottal and a beginning glottal stop. Hence 七一 and 西医 sound different. Maybe it's a gemination effect... I should buy out some time and check, methinks!
• If I'm making an effort to speak slowly and clearly, I introduce a few more vowel glide transitions into my speech in Mandarin, principally to make the tone (especially at the endpoints) more obvious (though I'd probably also be trying to speak in a more standard / 普通 way). I think I add a voiceless [j] to the second syllable if it's between two /i/ vowels.
• Hence in 無印 I would use liaison usually, and only if I was particularly in a hurry would I use a glottal stop.
• With Mandarin /u/, which I maintain in the cardinal position, I don't think I'd ever use a full velarised [w], nor a devoiced one. The glottal stop would almost always be present. Maybe it's the backness of the /u/?
• My English /uː/ is a bit more rounded than my Mandarin /u/, and I'd say the same average roundedness as my Mandarin /y/. I do sometimes force the /y/ a lot closer and more rounded if I need to in Mandarin; I (almost?) never do so in English. By comparison, my French /u/ is a lot more rounded than my Mandarin /u/, and my French /y/ is slightly more rounded than my average Mandarin /y/. So my almost total lack of glides is not related to the tenseness of my vowels.

• In Cantonese, I pronounce all my /j/, including in front of /i/ and /y/, but a lot less voiced than in English. I generally don't pronounce any /w/ in front of /u/, and tend to start it with a glottal stop. 

[davoosh]

I think it is easier to distinguish oo/woo and ee/yee in English, because English vowels tend to be slightly dipthongised or non-cardinal, so 'oo' is actually more like [əu] with a tiny schwa like vowel, and similarly 'ee' is [ıj] or [əj] or something along those lines. 

 

See east vs See yeast for me is something like [sıj ıjst] vs [sıj jıjst], so the /j/ is realised as doubled in the second sentence, unless I use a glottal stop as a break in the first sentence.

 

In Chinese the vowel is a pure cardinal (or near enough) so the initials <w y> would naturally be less discernible (if even present at all).