First opened Thursday, December 23, 2010
言う
いう
- flat (heiban)
How to read it: a line over a kana means the voice is high there, and ↓ marks where it drops. A kana with no line is low. With no ↓ the pitch stays high to the end and does not drop even on a following particle (が, は).
to say
Iu was ipu: the p became an f sound, then w, and a w before u never surfaced.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: Wiktionary's text for it doesn't give a split that spells the word and joins to its reading, and any other split would be a guess.
Written with 言
In a sentence
何ていう曲なの？
What's the name of this tune?
腹が減ったという。
He said that he was hungry.
Sentences are from Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR), picked by fixed rules from a dated export and shown unchanged. Nobody has reviewed them one by one.
What Wiktionary says
Quoted line by line from Wiktionary's Etymology section for this reading, taken from one dated dump so it can't change underneath us. Nothing below is paraphrased.
- “/ipu/ → /iɸu/ → /*iwu/ → /iu/ → /juː/”
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *ipu.”
- “Medial /p/ regularly changed from [p] → [ɸ] → [w]. Japanese never distinguished between /wu/ and /u/, so that automatically becomes [u]. The /w/ only surfaces in the negative form of iwanai, where the phoneme sequence /wa/ exists. Surface forms /iwimasu/ and /iwemasu/ automatically became /iimasu/ and /iemasu/ since Japanese no longer distinguishes /wi, we/ from /i, e/.”
Source: Wiktionary: 言う (dump of 2026-09-02), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Reading, meaning and part of speech from JMdict, and kanji readings from KANJIDIC2 (EDRDG).
What the labels mean
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.