Sokuon in funny places

Japanese Language
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Sokuon, the little つ that usually lengthens a consonant (makes it geminate), usually only appears in front of さ, た, か, and ぱ row characters. These are only unvoiced consonants. As far as I know, this is always the case for Japanese words. Loanwords are funny with voiced consonants sometimes, like big: ビッグ.

I read in a few places that there are applications of sokuon for loanwords from other languages, e.g. r-row hiragana for rolling r in Italian. One especially interesting case is the Pokemon Cramorant that is ウッウ, so a sokuon before a vowel, making it a bit like a glottal stop. :bird:

Did you come across more interesting or non-standard sokuon occurrences?

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Not really that interesting but I’ve also seen in the common loanword ベッド (bed) which is a little hard to pronounce for me.

Also, I’ve seen it in voice sfx like フッ (meaning something like “heh”). This could also be similar to a glottal stop (well, kind of).

There are probably more experienced people who can contribute a lot more here :sweat_smile:

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My understanding (although I’m very much a beginner) is that っ always represents a glottal stop, but a glottal stop in front of a consonant typically turns into a geminate. So it’s not that the usage of the sokuon has changed; it’s that the vocal effect changes depending on the surrounding sounds.

Can anyone else confirm/deny this? My linguistics 101 course was way too long ago.

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