Question regarding Japanese pronunciation (Glottal stop)

[AndrewLB]

Hi, I was told to ask here by Zalas. He said you were something of a linguistics buff, and

I'm doing a short presentation on just some basic Japanese linguistics information, and I figuring out the correct syllable template is proving a bit difficult, what with not being a native speaker of Japanese. Not to mention ethnologue claims it's a CV language, when it's clearly not.
So far, I've more or less come to the conclusion that it's a CCVC language, with the the bolded C: CCVC being a glottal stop.

So for example, philosophy would be transcribed as [ta-ʔkʰan]
And "tte" pronounced by itself would be [ʔtʰɛ].

In any event, if you're able to point me in the right direction, it'd be greatly appreciated.

[Haeleth]

I believe Japanese is usually described as CVN.

That's a bit of a simplification, of course (the possible syllables are V(V), CV(V), CVN, and CVQ, where たっかん is CVQ.CVN). I have a vague idea that Q is taken to belong to the previous syllable rather than the following one because that makes accentation rules easier to formulate, but I may be wrong on that.

Your transcriptions are about right. I'd probably go for [takkʰaã], since /Q/ is assimilated to the following consonant in normal pronunciation, but [ʔtʰɛ] is fine (if a rather special case).