6 posts tagged “japanese”

Not so much a very insightful post as a mere musing.

It has always puzzled me how one language can be so resilient to changing their phonologies when loaning words while others aren't.

There's languages that take on whole new phonemes purely from loaning from other languages. English Zoo has a word initial /z/ which in native words is illegal. Dutch goes even further, all instances of /s/ and /f/ are loan phonemes. It's highly dependent on the region in how much they merge with /z/ and /v/, but in my speech I have a clear distinction between fee 'fairy' and vee 'lifestock'. Other languages have taken on completely new illegal clusters in their language like āyiskrīm in Arabic with a CCC cluster. There's also some initial CR words though I can't think of them right now. Nevertheless Arabic always stayed quite resistant, often adapting loanwords to known consonant patterns.

bank 'bank' has a plural bunūk.

Other languages have gone even further completely taking over larger parts of illegal phonological traits. Swahili is probably a good example. stampu 'stamp' with a previously illegal st cluster at the beginning of a word.

It also amuses me that french has a word like scolaire after trying so hard to get rid of that cluster over the centuries creating école out of Latin schola.

And when you see languages this open to changes you wonder why Japanese after all this time and such an enormous influx of loanwords from english still refuses to pronounce love any different than /rabu/. Why, although often written as such, video is still pronounced /bideo/ and star trek is still /sutaatorekku/. Why is Japanese so resistant to changes in phonology and why aren't other languages?

The 'contact' or 'influence' argument gets you a long way, but doesn't fully cover the problems it brings. How can Latin be said to have such contact with French that it would influence their phonology, it's a dead language after all, that wasn't spoken widely either.

And maybe something could be said about English influence in Egyptian Arabic, but is such influence stronger than anglo-mania that currently spreads throughout Japanese? Not to mention the rather great, though not as great resilience to influence in Chinese loans as well. Sure it introduced some Cy clusters, but still Chinese loans sound, and never did, nothing like Chinese.

Maybe it has something to do with how limiting a phonology is? That would stand in the way why Swahili didn't follow Japanese's path. Maybe it is actually related to the orthography too?

Any musings are welcome.

Just for the fun of it, I have been looking into Japanese numerals, and their Pre-Japanese origin. And as always in Japanese, things never seem easy.

I paid special attention to the difference between the normal numerals, and the way days were counted. From now on when writing about Old-Japanese I will be using the Yale transcription, although I think the transcription at times is a bit odd, I think it'll do for now, until I get a better understanding of Pre-Old-Japanese to make a transcription myself if necessary.

First of all the pure Numerals which are often attested in Old-Japanese, but have almost completely disappeared in modern language.

1 pyito
2 puta
3 myi
4 yo
5 itu
6 mu
7 nana
8 ya
9 kokono
10 towo

20 also falls in the catagory of uncompounded numerals in the form of pata

In old Japanese these words could simply be prefixed to a noun.

pyito tose 'one year'
itu iro ' five colours'

A suffix -tu is often found behind these numerals, in which case they are usually connected with the genitive particle no. kuni no mutu 'Six districts'. This form is the only form that survived into Modern Japanese, except for some archaic expressions and (place)names. towo didn't take the suffix -tu.

But something odd happens along the way, sporadically some of the numerals started to geminate:
Old Japanese    Modern Japanese
1 pyito-tu           hitotu
2 puta-tu            hutatu
3 myi-tu             mittu / mitu (mitu is only found in bound forms)
4 yo-tu              yottu / yotu (yotu is only found in bound forms)
5 itu-tu              itutu
6 mu-tu             muttu / mutu
7 nana-tu           nanatu
8 ya-tu              yattu / yatu
9 kokono-tu       kokonotu
10 towo             too

The issue of the gemination is a difficult one, because it's hard to tell in Old Japanese transcription whether the existed back then already (when they were written phonetically at all).

The distribution seems to be that monosyllabic numerals were able to undergo gemination, while polysyllabic numeral didn't; Across the language though, this isn't a normal thing to happen. But it can be imagined that when counting the Japanese wanted all numerals to be about the same length, and thus they affected each other.

But now we get to the traditional counting of days with the counter suffix -ka and it gets all confusing!

1 pyito-pyi (one+day)
2 putu-ka
3 myi-ka (Modern mikka)
4 yo-ka (Modern yokka)
5 itu-ka
6 muyu-ka (Modern muika)
7 nanu-ka (Modern nanoka)
8 yau-ka  (Modern youka)
9 kokonu-ka (Modern kokonoka)
10 towo-ka (Moderna tooka)
20 patu-ka

First thing we notice is that in polysyllabic roots, the final vowel is replaced with u before the suffix -ka is added. The second think we notice is the gemination of 3 and 4. The numeral 7 and 9 both have no in modern Japanese, while with 9 this makes sense, as a form of analogy from the plain numeral, the plain numeral of 7 has na, not no, so this is a bit odd.

10 Didn't feel like joining in with the changing final vowel to u although it's polysyllabic, maybe becaus it would've lost the /w/. In Modern japanese though it would've yielded the same result, and I'm not 100% sure whether towo-ka is attested phonetically in Old Japanese, so maybe it did join .

Then there's the 6 and 8 who both felt like they were being left out by the polysyllabic roots and decided to add an u as well. is the y in 6 epenthetic to avoid two u's connecting? Is that why 8 doesn't have **yayu? Hard to say. the shift of muyu > mui is quite a regular one though, similar to yuku > iku ' to go', yuu > iu 'to speak'. But why do 6 and 8 join in and not 3 and 4? Is it Because 6 and 8 were surrounded by polysyllabic roots, while 3 and 4 had each other to hold on to their monosyllabic structure?

That seems to be the case, though it's almost impossible to prove. It's intresting that I came to a fairly steady conclusion, while when I started writing I thought it would be an ode to the weirdness of Japanese development. Hah, who says one needs to have his ideas ready before he starts writing!

Just a little side note, as is quite well known Japanese has a sort of odd ablaut binary counting system
pyito puta 1/2
myi mu 3/6
yo ya 4/8

So replacing yi with u, and o with a, doubles the numeral.

but could the root for twenty pata also be related to this 'system' and be of the same root as pyito- and puta-? Hard to tell, but I found it an interesting thought. Another question is where the hell this system came from. Ablaut isn't a very common form of word formation in Japanese, all ablaut that is found seems to come from combinations with a Pre-Japanese particle *-i. But not in the numerals.

I was having a discussion with FTPlus about how funny it was that all over the world, there's about three types of Cat words. you have 'CaT', 'PuSS', 'MIaW' (and NIaW) as patterns, the consonants can differ somewhat but that's about all the cats there are. And then I said: And then there's the Japanese with... neko.

Neko doesn't seem fall in any of these categories whe you look at it at first. There's an informal word for 'kitten' though, that does fall in these catagories. Namely 'nyanko'. Which would translate to 'meow-child'.

Then it dawned on me, it is hypthesizes that the modern Japanese /e/ in Proto-Japanese had two origins bot from -aiy and from -ya. While in Old Japanese this distinction was lost after most consonants, still some retained it, namely after /p/, /b/, /k/, /g/ and at a very early stage also after /m/. This is the moment we wish that a neko was called a meko, because what I'm going to suggest later on would be proven without a chance of discussion.

Some nice indications of the -a-i in words like fune 'ship'  which in compounds becomes funa like in funatabi 'trip by boat'. Japanologists hypothesise that this shows that there was a nominal suffix -i which was lost when compounding the word.

Proponants of Japanese being an Altaic language will tell you this is a 'clear' case of vowel harmony though (I'm not convinced).

Another reason that the origin of these e's  are hypothesised as diphthongs is that in Old-Japanese teksts, we find some contractions to form the right corresponding e's.

So now to get back to our neko. In Proto-Japanese this neko could have been both a nayko or a nyako. That's right! There we have our nyanko from modern Japanaese (save the /n/ of course). Even in modern day japanese the onomatopoetic word for meow meow is nyaa, nyaanyaa or nyannyan. Isn't that odd? It's almost as if, in the lexical 'meow-child' the contraction took place, but in the things that were still clearly onomatopoetic, the change never took place. This actually isn't all that odd, if onomatopoetic words would undergo sound changes, they'd quickly stop being onomatopoetic. Can you imagine Greek sheep saying [viːviː] rather than [bɛːbɛː] all of a sudden?

But what's really interesting is that the near identical formation of the word cat was created with Onomatopoia twice. I just thought I'd point it out.

There's one problem though, as I said, the two e variants were not distinguishable in Old-Japanese, so neko could in fact be Proto-Japanese *nayko, but let's be honest, it does sound likely that it was nyako right?

Just to close off an appropriate Haiku by Kobayashi Issa:
鳴く猫に赤ん目をして手まり哉

A very persistent, and blatantly wrong popular believe seems to exist that the Japanese word Arigatou 'thank you' is actually a loan from Portuguese 'Obrigado', yes these two look similar, and sound similar, but by no means is the one derived from the other, it's pure simple coincidence.

I ran into it again when I googled 'History of the Japanese Language' where I ran into this page:
http://www.todaytranslations.com/language-history/japanese-language-history/

Since the mid 18th century the Japanese have adopted a huge amount of "gairaigo": foreign words mainly from English. These include "teburu" (table), "biru" (beer), "gurasu" (glass), "aisu" (ice), "takushi" (taxi) and "hoteru" (hotel).

There are also a few words from Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish, such as "pan" (bread) and "arigato" (thank you), from the Portuguese "pão" and "obrigado". Such words arrived in Japan mainly during the 16th and 17th centuries, when missionaries and merchants started to visit the country.

Sure teiburu is from table, aisu is from ice, takushi is from taxi and hoteru is from hotel. Assuming that biiru and gurasu are from English though, is a bit short sighted. It could have just as well been from Dutch.

Glas is the Dutch word for glass, and while these days it is pronounced [χlɑs] (at least in my dialect), when the Dutch first had contact with the Japanese it was most likely pronounced [glɑs] or [ɣlɑs]. But this one is still open for discussion, and probably actually is english (Did we have glasses in the 18th century?).

Biiru though, is unmistakably Dutch, just like kouhii 'coffee' is.

The Dutch word for biiru is bier. What makes it so convincing that it Dutch then? Because it has Chinese characters:

麦酒

麦 ' Barley'

酒 'Sake'

Back in the days of the Dutch contact with Japan, it wasn't common for the katakana to be used for loanwords, and it was common for every noun to have characters, thus they gave beer just that.

Same goes for kouhii

珈琲 Which in meaning of the chracters has nothing to do with it, but seems to vaguely try to imitate the word for coffee (koffie in Dutch) as 'kahai'  in it's reading. How it ended up with a more accurate pronunciation than its characters is a mistery to me.

kouhii das in fact reveal an interesting fact about the pronunciation of the 'h'  at the time, that it must have been the hypothesized [ɸ] and by that emulate the Dutch word quite closely.

One who wants to mention that the [h] was simply used to replace the unfamiliar [f], this could be true if the word for Holland (alternate word for the Netherlands) was horanda in Japanese. But actually it is oranda, showing that the Japanese were unfamiliar to the [h] sound at the time.

Here I have greatly diverged from the original topic, but it all made some remote sense, honest!

A good way to check whether a word is a loanword or not, is to see if it has any morphological complexity within the language. For example alcohol is just one word in English, but if we see it as Arabic we clearly see the definite article al+kohl, which should be its origin.

Same goes for arigatou, or more complete arigatou gozaimasu

有り難う御座います

The fact that it actually has characters belonging to it, with conjugated endings should already have your alarms ringing.

In the spelling at the time arigatou was actually written arigatahu, a rather archaic (but still existent) conjugation of arigatai　有り難い (arigatahi at the time), a compound adjective consisting of 有り 'having'  and　難い　' difficult'

Arigatou gozaimasu  therefore translates to 'it is difficult for me to have'. I'm guessing the implication is ' it is difficult for me to have/accept your (whatever the person is giving you)', which is an appropriately humble way of saying thank you in Japanese.

So arigatou actually makes morphological sense in Japanese, making it incredibly unlikely that it is a loaned word.

So maybe the Portuguese loaned arigatou into their languages as obrigado then? No, no such luck either. obrigado is from the same source as the English word 'obliged', and with my limited knowledge of Latin I'd say the Latin for is obligatus. Note the incredibly typical but irregular l>r shift! Obligado thus means 'much obliged' or something along those lines (I don't actually speak Portuguese).

So now it's clear that it's just an odd twist of languages that two words turned out to be very similar.

As all of the people reading have probably noticed, I tend to write a lot about Indo-European. I try to fit in some of my other interests every now and then, but since I study Indo-European linguistics in university, I'm far more informed on that subject than the others.

But today I will actually write about something completely different, namely Japanese, and its earlier forms. Much like Indo-European Japanese actually has a form of reduplication in the verb. In fact Japanese has multiple forms of reduplications, also in nouns. What is remarkable about these reduplication, is that the reduplicated element will gain voicing. Allow me to give several examples.

First of all the nominal reduplications.

人人　ひとびと hitobito  'people'  (note that earlier, /h/ was probably /p/ or /ɸ/).
島島　しまじま simajima ' islands'
所所　ところどころ　tokorodokoro ' here and there'  (tokoro on itself means 'place')
度度　たびたび　tabitabi ' often'  (tabi no itself means ' time' as in how many times something happened. Notice that the second element isn't voiced yet, due to there being a voiced element in the word tabi already. 2x voiced in one element is disallowed. Sometimes this even seems to extend to the whole compound).

While it's not uncommon to reduplicate to form plurals, for example see Indonesian, it is rather weird the second element is voiced. Intervocalic voicing might be something you'd have in mind, but the above example already show it's perfectly possible to have intervocalic voiceless consonants.

In fact originally these voiced consonants where prenasalised and due to this prenasalisation the following consonant became voiced. But why would you prenasalise the consonant of a plural formation? It's difficult to make sense out of. This prenasalised element which I'll call *N is there though, and also in a very different kind of reduplication, namely Verbal reduplication.

Verbal reduplication isn't a complete reduplication though, not even a complete reduplication of the stem, it is solely a reduplication of the first syllable.

So a verb like CVC-u would become CVNCVC-u.

One of the more, especially to anime watching crowd, famous reduplicated nouns is:
続く　つづく　tsuzuku ' to continue'  with archaic spelling of 'zu'  as ' du'. This verb is used to indicate 'to be continued.  This is a reduplication of 付く　つく　tsuku ' to adjoin, to be attached'.

There's countless of these kinds of verbs for example:
止まる　とどまる　todomaru ' to remain'
止まる　とまる　tomaru ' to stop'  (note that when written in kanji, there's no difference in how it is written).

Similar to Indo-european reduplication Japanese reduplication seems to give a sense of 'itterativity'  or 'perfectivity' . Though in neither Japanese or Indo-European this could be called a fixed semantic meaning of the construction. There's also countless Japanese words that still have their reduplicated counterpart with little to no semantic change, or sometimes only the reduplicated word is found. For example in

縮む　ちぢむ　 chijimu 'to become small' (once again archaic spelling of ' ji'  as 'di'), But there is no verb ' chimu'.

But my point of this article besides illustrating this interesting phenomenon is that there is a certain problem with this construction from a historical point of view. Lets take tsuzuku as an example.

In Proto-Japanese the phonemic form would have been */tuNtuku/ which is derrived from */tuku/ (I'm skipping the problem with the vowels 1. because I don't know the exact proto-japanese vowels of these word and 2. because it's not relevant here). What exactly possesed the Proto-Japanese speakers to reduplicated this word while inserting a prenasalisation phoneme? Why not just **/tutuku/ Seems perfectly normal and not ambiguous, the extra */N/ actually seems to be over doing it.

Language generally finds a most ideal solution whenever possible. And even when it would create ambiguities language generally doesn't care. This extra */N/ is not ideal but superfluous, unless it had some kind of function. Maybe the same kind of function as it has in plural-reduplication. It's somehow a marking that says ' Hello! I'm tying two elements together!'. Odd little thing.

I've written about it before, since it also shows up in other compounds, generally tatpuruṣa compounds, display the insertion of the */N/, for those forms it could be explained as a simplification of particles like no and ni (genitive, and locative, respectively).

But in dvandva compounds, this */N/ is absolutely prohibited to appear, resulting in lovely pairs like these:
山川　やまがわ　yamagawa 'Mountain stream'
山川　やまかわ　yamakawa 'mountains and streams'.

This prohibition in dvandva compounds feels slightly odd though, because, if anything reduplicated plurals are most like dvandva compounds, compounding with themselves.

And then there's the sometimes incredibly stubborn */N/ that doesn't show up when you really do expect him to, like in the word for Tokyo
東京　とうきょう　toukyou ' Eastern Captical'. This is a typical tatpuruṣa compound why isn't it **tougyou?

This phenomenon is far from being explained. And sometimes the distribution of prenasalised consonants actually does seem to work much like how Altaic languages distribute their voiced consonants. What happened here? Were there maybe prenasalised, voiced and voiceless consonants where voiced and prenasalised consonants merged historically into prenasalised? Is that even possible?

Many questions, few answers. Throw about your ideas, think about it, or just enjoy this post. :-)

I'm going to break my promise, because my Tangut text is giving me severe troubles to translate. Therefore I'll now give a small, English summary of what my paper on Historical Linguistics was about.

Namely about Historical Causes of Rendaku in the Japanese language. I'll also attach a link to the actual paper, which will only be worth reading if you speak Dutch, but who knows, I might have millions of non-replying Dutch readers. (right.)

First off what is rendaku?

Rendaku is the process in modern Japanese in which the first consonant of the second element of a compound becomes voiced.

For example
koi 'love/passion' + hito 'person' = koibito 'lover' (h is historically p, so b is the voiced variant of h).

In modern Japanese this process is fairly unpredictable. My original hypothesis was that historically there must be some logical explanation for this. Further research showed that it isn't one 'cause' which caused all rendaku, but actually multiple processes working simultaneously and after each other, while undergoing vast amounts of analogy to 'fix' some words with or without rendaku again.

I won't go into all these processes, for it would take me about 20 pages to properly write them down. I'll only discuss one cause for rendaku, which I researched in my paper.

It's the rendaku that occurs through the simplification of the genitive particle "no". My theory is that many of the rendaku that has occurred between the Old and Middle Japanese period is through the elision of "no".

Originally the voicing of rendaku wasn't so much voicing, but prenasalisation. So it's logical to think that a syllable with a nasal is the cause of rendaku. But just having this hunch, of course isn't enough. You're also going to need proof, and proof is what I found.

There are very very many surnames in Japanese that undergo this rendaku. Japanese names are often place names.
And example of one of those surnames undergoing rendaku is "isozaki" which translates to "Beach of the Cape".

Even in modern Japanese, if you would actually want to talk about the physical place "beach of the cape" you would not use "isozaki" like the surname but you would use the genitive particle "no", like so: "iso no saki".

If you then have a look at the older Japanese, you will not find such surnames which are different from the place names. The above example would both be "iso nö saki", whether it's the place name or the surname.

There is many many examples of this. Thus my theory is that, in colloquial speech, in environments where "iso no saki" was seen as a unit rather than 2 nouns and a particle, the vowel was often elided, and then remaining n caused prenasalisation.

This makes it especially easy to understand that this especially happens in surnames, where the meaning isn't really important. Later on this colloquialism was lexicalised as the way said surname was to be pronounced.

It'd be a bit odd to conclude this is what happened purely on surnames though. Luckily there's also several words which have undergone the same kind of "no" elision as in surnames.

For example 'spring mist' harugasumi. which comes from haru 'spring' + no + kasumi 'mist'. Even now you could probably still describe spring mist as 'haru no kasumi', but the word with this meaning is 'harugasumi'. In Old Japanese though, there's no such thing as harugasumi, only "paru nö kasumi".

There's also some pairs of surnames and nouns, which were originally the same, but in which the surname lost its "no" particle.

For example ama no kawa (litt. river of the sky) "milky way" also occurs as a surname, but then it is written "amagawa".
Another one is ko no ha "leaves" which also exist as a surname but then written "koba".

I could still write a lot more about this interesting thing, but you'll just have to see for yourself in my paper. I consider it as proven that the genitive particle "no" is indeed the cause of some of the rendaku that has occurred in between Old Japanese and Middle Japanese.

This doesn't explain though, the already existing Rendaku in Old Japanese. Whether we'll ever be able to explain that, I don't know, I  don't think we will.

(I'll include a link to the paper later on, if anyone is interested.)

P.S. Just for the record I received a 8/10 mark for this paper, so I guess whatever I'm saying makes enough sense :P

Edit:

I've decided to upload my paper I wrote, it's a shame it's in Dutch, but hopefully those who are interested wont experience this as too big of a barrier.

http://members.home.nl/marijnvanputten/rendaku.pdf