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In Japan for three years, and I've noticed that the locals often sound like they're combining the two words "arigatō" and "gozaimasu" into a single word, "arigatōzaimasu".

Am I hearing things (possible, as they speak very quickly), or is this a common practice?

Mechanical snail
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Terrance Shaw
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2 Answers2

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Another possibility is that the /g/ is being lenited into a voiced velar fricative /ɣ/, as is common between vowels in Japanese. (See "Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: Japanese" by Hideo Okada, or Wikipedia.) Further, since the second /g/ has rounded vowels (/o/) on both sides, it is likely to be somewhat rounded (/ɣʷ/ = /w̝/).

The utterance, phonemically

/aɽígatoogozaimásu/

then would be something like

[àɽíɣàtoow̝ozaimás]

Judging by your username, I'm guessing you're a native English speaker. Since most varieties of English diphthongize /o/ to something like /ow/, and minimally distinguish vowel length, English speakers are likely less sensitive to the intervening [w̝] and to the extra-long vowel sequence /ooo/. So you hear the utterance as

/arigatoːzaimas/

which would be transcribed as "arigatōzaimasu".

Mechanical snail
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    Your assumption on my native tongue is correct, and that is one very fine and in-depth answer. – Terrance Shaw Sep 08 '12 at 09:01
  • The lenition to [ɣ] was what I had guessed as well. Good explanation! – Zhen Lin Sep 08 '12 at 11:56
  • Does this rule out the possibility of an underlying morphological process? How do we know that /aɽígatoogozaimásu/ is or is not a derived compound? – taylor Sep 08 '12 at 19:37
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I think you're just hearing two words that get said quickly and become slurred because they're so commonly used together. Human beings are lazy like that. I would think that "thank you" sounds like one word to a non-native English speaker :)

silvermaple
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