> Odd. I've always considered Japanese "double consonants" to be
> glottal stops. Could anyone please explain the difference?
They are glottal stops. But Japanese writing doesn't have a (standard)
means of expressing a glottally stopped vowel pair. It only can express
consonants. One supposes that a small "tsu" would suffice, e.g.
ハヴァイッイ => hawai'i... And probably has already been used somewhere
to that effect. As Ed Cherlin pointed out, "tsu" has been adapted for
word-final consonants... in that sense, "tsu" is effectively used as a virama
already.
I still don't know if there's any Japanese phonetic scholarship that
distinguishes "L" and "R"...
Rick
