Siri's pronunciation of ふ Recently, I've been using Siri in Japanese to set cooking timers. I've noticed she pronounced theinclearly as /hu/, not /fu/. _From Wikipedia:_ > Old Japanese does not have /h/, but rather /ɸ/ (preserved in modern fu, /ɸɯ/), which has been reconstructed to an earlier /*p/. _Also from Wikipedia:_ > It represents the phoneme /hu͍/, although for phonological reasons, the actual pronunciation is [ɸu͍]. The sound sample in the Wikipedia article does sound more like /fu/. While I understand it's basically the same phoneme for the Japanese, I do hear the difference. Hence the question. Is the Siri's variant acceptable?

Well, I can again only speculate, but if they say it did not have `/h/` but had `/ɸ/` and nowadays it have `/h/`, it have probably evolved from that `/ɸ/`. When _I_ played with my mouth and tried to say /hɯ/, with stiff lips as the Japanese /ɯ/ is to be pronounced, than I get a sound which resembles rather /ɸɯ/. So, maybe it is ok to try to say /hɯ/, you say /ɸɯ/ anyway, if you are a living human being, just Siri isn't ;-)

But that's just my speculations.