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The Phonology of JapaneseLaurence Labrune
Print publication date: 2012Print ISBN-13:
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Title Pages
The Phonology of JapaneseThe Phonology of the WorldsLanguagesThe
Phonology of Japanese
General Editor: Jacques Durand
Published
The Phonology of Icelandic and Faroese
Kristjn rnason
The Phonology of Danish
Hans Basbll
The Phonology of Dutch
Geert Booij
The Phonology of Standard Chinese, second edition
San Duanmu
The Phonology of Polish
Edmund Gussmann
The Phonology of English
Michael Hammond
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The Phonology of Italian
Martin Krmer
The Phonology of Norwegian
Gjert Kristoffersen
The Phonology of Japanese
Laurence Labrune
The Phonology of Portuguese
Maria Helena Mateus and Ernesto dAndrade
The Phonology and Morphology of Kimatuumbi
David Odden
The Lexical Phonology of Slovak
Jerzy Rubach
The Phonology of Hungarian
Pter Siptr and Mikls Trkenczy
The Phonology of Mongolian
Jan-Olof Svantesson, Anna Tsendina, Anastasia Karlsson, and
VivanFranzn
The Phonology of Armenian
Bert Vaux
The Phonology and Morphology of Arabic
Janet Watson
The Phonology of Catalan
Max Wheeler
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The Phonology of German
Richard Wiese
In preparation
The Phonology of Tamil
Prathima Christdas
The Phonology of Welsh
S. J. Hannahs
The Phonology of Turkish
Bari Kabak
The Phonology of Latin
Giovanna Marotta
The Phonology of Spanish
Iggy Roca
The Phonology of Greek
Anthi Revithiadou
The Phonology of Swedish
Tomas Riad
The Phonology of Washo
Alan C. L. Yu
(p. iv )
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The Phonology of JapaneseLaurence Labrune
Print publication date: 2012Print ISBN-13:
9780199545834Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May-12DOI:
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Acknowledgements
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199545834.002.0005
This work is a substantially revised and updated version of my
book inFrench entitled La phonologie du japonais, jointly published
by the ParisLinguistic Society and Peeters editions in 2006.
For his constant support and enthusiasm, I would like to express
mygratitude to Jacques Durand, who supervised this work from its
verybeginnings and later gave me the opportunity to publish it at
OxfordUniversity Press.
Many thanks are also due to the following friends and colleagues
for theircomments and help on earlier versions in French or in
English of this bookor on parts of it: the late Nick Clements, Marc
Plnat, Takayama Tomoaki,Catherine Garnier, Franois Dell, Tanaka
Shinichi, Irne Tamba, Elsa Gomez-Imbert, Martin Kramer and several
anonymous readers.
I am especially indebted to Kamiyama Takeki who read the entire
finalmanuscript with great care, making many valuable comments
andsuggestions which helped me correct a number of mistakes.
Particular mention must also be made of Abe Junko, Hiraide
Naoya, WakasaAnju, Furihata Atsuko, Nakamura Yayoi, Kawaguchi Yuji,
and many otherfriends and colleagues who kindly provided
information on the Japaneseexamples, of Joan Busquets for his help
in editing the figures, and of MichelVieillard-Baron for assistance
with the poetic materials.
I am also most grateful to all the Japanese scholars who have
provided mewith their teaching, advice, support, and help
throughout the last twenty
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years or so during my research stays in Japan, in particular
Komatsu Hideo,Kitahara Yasuo, Hayashi Chikafumi, Haraguchi Shsuke,
Jo Hakutar, KondTakako, Aoki Sabur, and I am especially grateful to
Takayama Tomoaki whowas always willing to share his vast knowledge
of the phonology of Modernand Ancient Japanese with me. I owe a
special and old debt to AkinagaKazue thanks to whom I discovered
the joy of Japanese phonology at WasedaUniversity during the years
19871989.
I acknowledge with gratitude several scholarships from the
Japanese Ministryof Education and The Japan Foundation, which
allowed me to conductresearch in Japan at Waseda University and
Tsukuba University on severaloccasions. These institutions gave me
the precious opportunity to carry outmost of the preliminary
investigation for this work. My research has alsobenefited from the
constant scientific and financial support of my CNRSresearch team
in Bordeaux and in Toulouse, CLLE ERSS (UMR 5263) and theUniversity
of Bordeaux 3 which I also want to thank.
(p. vi ) I also thank Teddy Auly, a cartographer at the Centre
National de laRecherche Scientifique and the University of Bordeaux
3, who edited the twomaps included in this book.
Finally, my sincere thanks go to John Davey and his staff at
Oxford UniversityPress for their editorial support and everlasting
patience.
None of these persons, of course, necessarily agrees with the
analyses Ipropose. All errors and omissions are mine.
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The Phonology of JapaneseLaurence Labrune
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Tables, Figures, and Maps
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199545834.002.0007
Table 1.1. Hiragana (basic symbols) 8Table 1.2. Katakana (basic
symbols) 9Table 3.1. Consonantal phonemes of Japanese 59Table 4.1.
Summary of blocking patterns among Yamato nounnouncompounds
123Table 6.1. The 103 distinctive moras of Modern Standard
Japanesein phonological transcription 144Table 7.1. Location of
accent in nominal Yamato and Sino-Japanesewords (according to
Sibata, 1994), in relation to length of lexemes187Table 7.2. Accent
of simplex Yamato nouns 194Table 7.3. Accentual effect of particles
195Table 7.4. Accent of verbs 198Table 7.5. Accent of -i adjectives
199Table 7.6. Accent of compounds made up of a numeral +
Sino-Japanese specifier 246Table 7.7. Cross-dialectal accent
correspondences for bimoraicnouns for the five Kindaichi word
classes 256Figure 2.1. Spectrogram and oscillogram of aki kara
(with devoicedi) 35Figure 2.2. Spectrogram and oscillogram of aki
demo (no devoicingof i) 36Figure 2.3. Final vowel shortening in
Western clippings 48Figure 2.4. Token frequency of vowels in
Archaic Japanese 57Figure 2.5. Token frequency of vowels in Modern
Japanese 57
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Figure 3.1. Textual frequency (in %) of Archaic Japanese
consonants99Figure 3.2. Lexical frequency (in %) of Archaic Yamato
Japaneseconsonants for the initial of words 100Figure 3.3. Lexical
frequency in absolute value of consonantsaccording to their
position in bimoraic Yamato nouns in the modernlanguage 100Figure
3.4. Textual frequency of modern Japanese consonants 101Figure 7.1.
Accent curve (F0) of hana-ga flower 182Figure 7.2. Accent curve
(F0) of hana-ga nose 182Map 1. Administrative Japan xivMap 2.
Geographical distribution of accent types 252
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The Phonology of JapaneseLaurence Labrune
Print publication date: 2012Print ISBN-13:
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Notes on Transcription, Abbreviations, and Other Matters
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199545834.002.0008
The system of romanization adopted throughout the book is the
Hepburnsystem (####, hebon-shiki), except for the notation of the
bilabial fricative[F] which is written as h before u, and of vowel
length. Long vowels aretranscribed as ou, aa, ii, ei, or ee,uu
(rather than ,,, , ), except in propernames, linguistic terms, and
in the bibliography. This transcription, which hasbeen calqued on
the kana writing, has the advantage of allowing for a moreadequate
notation of accent by dissociating the two parts of a long vowel.
Ithas one drawback, which is that it does not allow for a
distinction betweentou # tower (actually pronounced as [to]) and
tou ## to ask ([to])which are both spelled as ## in hiragana. IPA
transcription will be providedfor disambiguation of ou sequences in
the text when necessary.
When needed, the phonological transcription (see Table 6.1,
section 6.1)is used, as well as phonetic transcriptions in the
International PhoneticAlphabet (IPA). For instance, the word
####(## in kanji) meaning repairwill be transcribed as shuuri in
adapted Hepburn, /syuRri/ in phonologicaltranscription, and [i] in
IPA.
In Hepburn romanizations, the accented mora appears in bold. In
IPAtranscriptions, the sign is placed before the accented mora
following theusual practice in the IPA: kokoro [kokoo] heart,
kyouto [kjoto] Kyto.Atonic words are followed by the symbol :
sakura cherry tree. ManyJapanese words display several possible
accent patterns. Generally, onlythe most frequent pattern is given
for a word, except when accent variationmay be relevant to the
discussion. Accent will not be provided for ancient,dialectal, or
invented forms (except when relevant for the discussion),for
non-independent morphemes and in cases where the form has to be
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considered independently of its accentuation. In the citation of
examplestaken from other scholars who do not provide accent
information, I haveautomatically added the accent patterns if
necessary.
The source word of Western loans is given between braces:
konpyuutaacomputer {computer}.
The components in transparent compound words are separated by a
hyphen:kodomo-beya children's room when relevant to the
discussion.
The following abbreviations are used:
(p. xiii ) intr.= intransitive verb
tr.= transitive
= any mora
m= deficient (weak) mora
M= regular mora
= syllable
= foot
V= vowel
C= consonant
C1= initial constituent, C2 = final constituent (in
compounds)
#= word boundary
*= unattested form (or, reconstructed forms in passages dealing
withhistorical matters)
jp= Japanese
ch= Chinese
rk= Rykyan
H= high (tone), or heavy syllable
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L= low (tone), or light syllable
AJ= Archaic Japanese
OJ= Old Japanese.
In Chapter 3, which is devoted to the consonantal system, the
notation ofclassical (linear) generative phonology is used. For
instance, the formula x y /_ z reads as x becomes y when occurring
before z.
Old Chinese reconstructions come from Td (1996) except when
otherwisespecified.
Japanese personal names are given in the following order: family
name,personal name. They are cited under the romanized form which
appears inthe original publication. Authors names of books and
papers published inJapanese have been transcribed following the
Hepburn system, except forthose people who have chosen some other
transcription (when this othertranscription is known to me).
The spectrograms and the oscillograms were made using the Praat
softwaredeveloped by Paul Boersma and David Weenink, Amsterdam.
Finally, note that contrary to a majority of recent Western
works on Japanesephonology, I do not recognize the existence of the
syllable in this language,although I will occasionally provide
syllabic information or representations forcomparative purposes
when needed. The view retained in this book is that ofthe native
Japanese tradition in phonology, which holds that only the mora
isrelevant. (p. xiv )
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Map 1. Administrative Japan
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The Phonology of JapaneseLaurence Labrune
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Introduction
Laurence Labrune
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199545834.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
This first chapter provides a general introduction to the book,
presenting itsaims, methods, theoretical background, the status,
origins, and periodisationof the Japanese language, as well as the
previous scholarship written on thesubject of Japanese phonology.
It also presents the writing system of modernJapanese, made of a
mixture of Chinese characters, two kana syllabaries andLatin
alphabet, and describes and discusses the issue of the lexicon
partitioninto Yamato, Sino-Japanese and Western words.
Keywords: Japanese language, periodisation, Japanese writing
system, Chinese characters,two kana syllabaries, Latin, Yamato
words, Sino-Japanese words, Western words
The Phonology of Japanese offers a comprehensive overview of
thephonological structure of modern Japanese from its segmental to
its prosodicand accentual structure. The purpose of the book is
twofold.
First, it will present the actual state of the art of Japanese
phonology,based on a compilation of recent and older Western and
Japanese materials,reflecting current debates in Japanese
phonology. The aim is to providea synthesis of two major research
streams: that of Japanese traditionallinguistics and philology,
kokugogaku ###, which is characterized by itsdata-oriented
approach, a strong philological background, and carefulattention to
the empirical realities of the language, but which,
unfortunately,seems to be largely ignored outside Japan in spite of
its excellence andremarkable achievements (see the seminal works by
Kindaichi Haruhiko,Hashimoto Shinkichi, Hattori Shir, Hamada
Atsushi, Kamei Takashi, and
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many others); that of Western scholarship, for which Japanese
has oftenserved as a test ground for newly developing theories. One
should recallthat many aspects of Japanese phonology have
contributed to the advanceof modern phonological theory in a
significant manner. Without aiming atexhaustivity, let us mention
the works of James McCawley in the 1960s(classical generative
phonology), Haraguchi Shsuke in the 1970s (non-linear phonology),
It Junko and Armin Mester in the 1980s and 1990s(underspecification
theory, Optimality Theory), and Kubozono Haruo in the1990s and
2000s (Optimality Theory).
In sum, the main ambition of this book is to survey the
achievements byscholars belonging to different linguistic schools
and traditions, to assessthem critically, and to integrate them
into a uniform approach in order tomake the results available to a
larger scientific community. It is hard tosimply grasp the quantity
and quality of native research when one hasno access to it, and it
is even harder to evaluate it, be it in the field ofphonology or of
any other area of linguistics. It should also be acknowledgedthat
some recent Western works often fail to give credit to the richness
andexcellence of this tradition.1 This is (p. 2 ) why it has
appeared essential todevote so much attention to Japanese
contributions through an approachthat attempts to blend and
reconcile, in a unifying perspective, two waysof doing linguistics
that usually ignore each other. This stand by no meansprecludes our
casting a critical eye over one or other approach.
Further, this book aims to offer new analyses and data
concerning someof the central issues of Japanese phonology in a
theoretically orientedapproach. Issues for which new analyses are
proposed in this volume arethose of the mora and syllable, the
notion of special mora, compoundnoun accentuation, default
accentuation (through a case study of Westernborrowings), the
underlying accent of some Sino-Japanese morphemes, thestatus of
diphthongs, the consonant /r/, and the interaction of moras
andfeet.
The aim is thus to provide both a critical synthesis of the
state of the artin Japanese phonology and to provide theoretically
oriented descriptionand analyses in its main areas. However, the
purpose is not to promotea given theoretical or formal framework
set in advance and to which thedata of Japanese would be forcefully
moulded. Rather, what I have tried todo is to provide generalalbeit
preciseinformation on the phonologicalstructure of the Japanese
language in all its complexity and, whenever itappears relevant, to
point to the analytical and theoretical extensions of the
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issue likely to be considered. Therefore it is why priority is
always given tothe presentation of the linguistic data. I have
nevertheless chosen to givea tighter theoretical and formal
treatment to a small number of specificissues that have appeared to
deserve more thorough treatment due to theirimportance in the
field.
There are unfortunately a number of issues that I could not
address as Iwould have liked to. Notably, there is no in-depth
treatment of intonation.The morpho-phonology of verbal flexion
would also probably have meriteda whole chapter. However, this
aspect of Japanese morpho-phonologybeing generally introduced in
Japanese grammars and even textbooks, it isrelatively easy to find
good descriptions of it outside specialized phonologyor morphology
works.
This book is intended for a general audience of students and
linguists withno specialized knowledge of the Japanese language,
and to non-linguistJapanologists who want to obtain up-to-date
information in the field ofJapanese phonology.
For the needs of the latter audience, Japanese terminology has
beenprovided both in roman transcription and in the original
writing (kana orkanji), and priority has been given to first-hand
sources and references in theJapanese language.
(p. 3 ) 1.1 Theoretical Background
The general framework of our reflection and analyses will be
that ofgenerative phonology in the broad sense as it has been
developed from theend of the 1960s onwards, although some parts of
the book also owe a greatdeal to structural phonology, a current
that was widely followed in Japanin the 1940s, 1950s, and even
later, in the works of outstanding Japaneselinguists like Hattori
Shir and Kindaichi Haruhiko, whose analyses will beoften referred
to in the following pages. But whatever framework lies behindour
discussions, a distinction is always made between an underlying
form (orinput) and a surface form (output). In order to account for
the formal relationwhich exists between these two levels, we adopt
a non-derivational approachwhich is that of Optimality Theory (see
Prince and Smolensky, 1993, Kager,1999, for introductions), in
which the relationship between the input and theoutput is viewed as
the result of the interaction of constraints rather thansequential
rule application as in the traditional generative model (Chomskyand
Halle, 1968). Such an approach proves to be particularly effective
forthe treatment of phenomena relating to prosodic
morpho-phonology, and it
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will be used, in particular, for the formal analysis of default
accentuation andcompound nouns accentuation which will be offered
in Chapter 7.
As regards contents representations, be it the internal
structure ofsegments in terms of distinctive features or the
architecture of the prosodiccomponents, the references are clearly
those of traditional non-linear andautosegmental phonology.
Optimality Theory has actually very little to sayabout the contents
and nature of representations, and is compatible withvarious
representational conceptions.
Phonology being a relatively technical and formal discipline, it
was notpossible within the limits of this work to provide
definitions and explanationsof all the concepts used here. It is
assumed that the basic notions ofarticulatory phonetics and of
phonological analysis are known. Readers whowant to acquaint
themselves with the discipline are invited to consult forexample
the reference works of Kenstowicz (1994a), Goldsmith (1990,
1995),and Hayes (2009), which provide good introductions to various
aspects ofphonological theory.
In the pages devoted to the presentation of segmental phonology
(Chapters2, 3, and 4), the theoretical background of the
description and analyses willbe cast in a classical (and rather
neutral) framework in terms of features andstatements. A broadly
generativist phonological framework will be adopted,such as the one
introduced in Kenstowicz (1994a). For the mora and syllableanalysis
(Chapter 6), the autosegmental, non-linear framework will be used.I
will refer especially to the conceptions developed by Larry Hyman
(2003[1985]) regarding (p. 4 ) the status of the TBU (tone-bearing
units), i.e. themoras, for the analysis, but other standard models
will also be reviewed forthe sake of comparison.
The accentual analyses of compound nouns and of Western
borrowingsin Chapter 7 (sections 7.2.5 and 7.3.2) are cast within
the frameworkof Optimality Theory. Some other current phonological
frameworks willoccasionally be referred to when necessary, for
instance when previousscholarship and analyses concerning some of
the problems of Japanesephonology provide alternative and arguably
more insightful views of thephenomena under consideration.
1.2 The Japanese Language
Japanese is spoken by about 130 million speakers, nearly all
living inthe Japanese archipelago. Its genetic affiliation is
dubious. It has often
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been classified as a Ural-Altaic language, but the reality of
its origins ismore complex. Prehistoric Japanese is probably the
result of hybridizationbetween an Austronesian and an Altaic
language, with some possible othercontinental influences.
The language closest to Japanese is Rykyan, spoken in the Ryky
Islands,southwest of Kysh. Together, they form the Japonic
family.
The language closest to Japanese outside Rykyan is Korean.
Thereexist strong typological resemblances between the two
languages, whichsuggest a genetic relationship, although
well-established regular phoneticcorrespondences are hard to
establish (see Martin, 1966 for an attempt).
Two main Japanese dialect groups are recognized: Eastern
dialects (Tkytype) and Western dialects (Kyto-saka type), and Japan
is still a countrywith great dialectal diversity.
This book is primarily concerned with Modern and Contemporary
StandardJapanese. Japanese linguists generally refer to that
variety as hyjungo (###) standard language, kytsgo (###) common
language, or Tkygo (###) the Tky dialect. It corresponds roughly to
the language spoken in thedistricts of the area known as Yamanote
in Tky and in the national media,in particular the NHK (Japanese
Broadcasting Corporation).
We will also refer to dialectal varieties of the language and to
historicaldevelopments when necessary for an understanding of the
synchronic facts.
For the periodization of Japanese, the following labels are
adopted. Thesedivisions also correspond to standard major political
divisions in Japanesepolitical history:
Archaic Japanese (jdaigo###): before 794 (until the end of
theNara period)
Old Japanese (chkogo ###): 7941350 (Heian and Kamakura) (p. 5 )
Middle Japanese (chseigo ###): 13501603 (Muromachi,
Azuchi-Momoyama) Pre-modern Japanese (kinseigo ###): 16031868
(Edo) Modern Japanese (kindaigo ###): 18681945 (from Meiji to
World War II)
Archaic Japanese was the period when Chinese characters were
firstmassively imported into Japan. The materials of those times
are writtenexclusively using Chinese characters, read in a Chinese
or a Japanese
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manner (Manygana, #### Chinese characters used only for
theirphonetic value, see below).
Old Japanese saw the development of the kana syllabaries, and
theflourishing of a national literature written exclusively in kana
with very fewwords of Chinese origin. The language reflected in the
materials is primarilythat of the Kyto aristocracy and has served
as the basis for the prestigewritten language for centuries.
The middle of the fourteenth century can be seen as the major
turning pointbetween Ancient and Modern Japanese, to the extent
that it is sometimessufficient to oppose Old Japanese (the language
before the fifteenth century)to Modern Japanese (the language after
the fifteenth century). MiddleJapanese underwent significant
changes due to the spread of the Sino-Japanese vocabulary and the
generalized use of the kanji to write it. Theso-called kanji-kana
majiri bun (######## kanji and kana mix style),based on a mixture
of kanji and kana as in Modern Japanese (see section 1.5)became the
most common style of writing. Middle Japanese is also a periodof
major modification in the verbal and adjectival flexional system as
well asin the phonological system with the establishment of the
special segments(see Chapter 5), as a result of the sound changes
known as onbin ##, whosefirst occurrences can be traced back to Old
Japanese.
Pre-modern Japanese, in the Edo period, is known to us through a
hugenumber of different types of materials reflecting the
colloquial and dialectaldiversity of the time, including a number
of foreign descriptions of theJapanese language, principally
European ones, with the publication ofdictionaries and grammar
books, but also accounts made by Chinese andKorean scholars (such
foreign descriptions of Japanese actually started in thefifteenth
century). Modern Japanese, starting with the Meiji Restauration
in1868, has been influenced by Western languages. It also
corresponds to thespread of Tky Japanese as the standard language,
and the development ofa new form of written language closer to the
spoken one.
Contemporary Japanese (gendaigo ###) can be used more
specifically torefer to the variety of language which developed
after World War II.
(p. 6 ) 1.3 Particular Status of Japanese for Linguistic
Science
A word should be said here about the status of Japanese in the
field oflinguistics. Japanese is no doubt one of the
best-documented non-Indo-European languages in the world, if not
the best-documented. In addition, it
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has a rare characteristic: most specialists of Japanese
linguistics are nativespeakers of the language, who, moreover, have
been working within theirown rich linguistic tradition in a
cumulative manner, without ignoring theachievements of general
linguistics outside their country. This tradition,it should be
emphasized, did not develop in an intellectual
environmentcompletely sealed off from the rest of the world. It has
been nourished byChinese, Indian, European, and American
contributions throughout its longhistory. Descriptive and
cumulative work has thus been conducted in anoptimal manner,
although one might have the feeling that, in very recentyears, even
the major works by outstanding scholars such as Arisaka
Hideyo,Hashimoto Shinkichi, Kindaichi Haruhiko, and Hattori Shir,
for example,are no longer part of the compulsory reading of younger
Japanese linguiststrained in the West.
Last but not least, Japanese linguistic research has enjoyed
quite afavourable economic environment. For decades, the various
academicinstitutions of the country such as research centres and
universities havedevoted an impressive number of material means to
research on thenational language and its dialects, with the result
that one can benefit,in the case of Japanese, from an exceptional
quantity of quality data anddocumentation (even more, it seems,
than for English or French, whichhave also been extensively
studied). The accumulation of descriptive andanalytical materials
is completely bewildering, and contemporary phonologywould be much
worse off if it did not take account of the contributions of
theJapanese academic tradition.
1.4 Previous Western Literature On the Phonology ofJapanese
There exist few general references in European languages
relating tothe phonology of Japanese, in comparison to the huge
number of studiescarried out in Japan. I will only mention here
studies of a general andbroad character, but naturally there are a
fair number of articles and somemonographs relating to specific
aspects of the phonology of Japanese(mainly in English).
The excellent book by Timothy J. Vance, An Introduction to
JapanesePhonology, published in 1987, constitutes the best
descriptive reference ofthe (p. 7 ) discipline in the English
language. Unfortunately, it has been outof print for a number of
years, and therefore hard to get. Timothy Vance isalso the author
of The Sounds of Japanese, published in 2008, which is a
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handbook designed for English-speaking students. It is of course
impossiblenot to mention James McCawleys thesis, The Phonological
Component of aGrammar of Japanese, published in 1968, which was one
of the first studiesseeking to apply to a language other than
English the generativist frameworkof the Sound Pattern of English
(Chomsky and Halle, 1968). This referenceremains invaluable, and
much of the data and analyses of McCawley havenot lost their
interest, but a lot of water has gone under the bridge
ofphonological theory since 1968, so the framework is a bit
outdated. Oneshould also mention the monograph by Samuel E. Martin,
Morphophonemicsof Standard Colloquial Japanese, published in 1952,
that of Gnther Wenck,The Phonemics of JapaneseQuestions and
Attempts (1966) as well asJapanese Phonetics (1997) and Japanese
Phonology (2000) by AkamatsuTsutomu. Wenck is also the author of a
monumental Japanische Phonetikin four volumes, written in German
(19541959). In French, one shouldmention Haruhiko Kinda-ichi (=
Kindaichi) and Hubert Mass, Phonologie dujaponais standard,
published in 1978, which consists in fact of a translationand
adaptation by the second author of an original Japanese text by
thefirst author (Kindaichi), one of the most eminent Japanese
phonologists.In addition to the fact that it is out of print, this
work, which is rather short(59 pages), is theoretically outdated. I
am the author of La phonologie dujaponais, published in 2006 by the
Socit de Linguistique de Paris (Peeters,Leuven). The present book
is a substantially updated and modified versionof this 2006 French
edition. All these books, except for Labrune (2006) andVance
(2008), have sadly been out of print for a number of years.
1.5 Overview of the Writing System
Throughout this book, we will occasionally refer to the
orthographical statuswhich some of the phonological units of the
language have received in thenative writing system of Japanese.
This is because the written dimensionprovides an interesting
background to the phonological reality of these units.The graphemic
system often reflects the phonemic one, and, vice versa,since
phonology in turn can be influenced by the writing system, or, to
putit in Suzukis words (Suzuki, 1977), writing can become a
formative agentof the language. This is especially true for
Japanese. Kess and Miyamoto(1999:32) observe that the nature of the
multi-faceted Japanese orthographymust be viewed as a formative
agent that exerts some influence, if notpower, over the spoken
language itself. However, it goes without sayingthat the
orthographical criteria should not be held up as definite proof of
thephonological status of a given element.
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(p. 8 ) This being said, a general presentation of the writing
system ofJapanese will be given in the following pages, but readers
with no specificinterest in the issue may skip this section and
proceed directly to thefollowing one.
The Japanese writing system is composed of four different
scripts. First, it hastwo original syllabaries2 of 48 signs each
(of which 46 only are presently incommon use), the hiragana ### and
the katakana ###, which are referredto under the generic term of
kana ##. Katakana and hiragana were createdby the Japanese. They
both took as their basis Chinese characters usedonly for their
phonetic value (the manygana ####; see Seeley, 1991for a general
presentation of the history and development of the Japanesewriting
system in English). Hiragana and katakana are based on the mora3and
take as their basis the same units, so that a given mora of
Japanesecan be denoted by the corresponding letter of either set.
The elaboration ofthese two sets of kana symbols was more or less
achieved around the tenthcentury.
In addition, several thousands of ideographic characters
originally borrowedfrom Chinese, the kanji ##, are used. The Latin
alphabet, rma-ji ####, andArabic numerals are also part of the
modern writing system. The writing of aJapanese text is done today
by using in a joint and complementary way thefirstTable 1.1.
Hiragana (basic symbols)
a # i # u # e # o #
ka # ki # ku # ke # ko #
sa # shi # su # se # so #
ta # chi # tsu # te # to #
na # ni # nu # ne # no #
ha # hi # hu # he # ho #
ma # mi # mu # me # mo #
ya # yu # yo #
ra # ri # ru # re # ro #
wa # wi # we # wo #
N #(p. 9 )
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Table 1.2. Katakana (basic symbols)
a # i # u # e # o #
ka # ki # ku # ke # ko #
sa # shi # su # se # so #
ta # chi # tsu # te # to #
na # ni # nu # ne # no #
ha # hi # hu # he # ho #
ma # mi # mu # me # mo #
ya # yu # yo #
ra # ri # ru # re # ro #
wa # wi # we # wo #
N #three systems (hiragana,katakana, and kanji), and, in an
accessory manner,the latter two.
The writing of Japanese is unanimously recognized as one of the
mostcomplex, or even the most complex, of all known systems. As
Kess andMiyamoto (1999:13) put it, it is no stretch of the
imagination to declareJapanese one of the most intricate, most
elegant and yet most difficultwriting systems in the modern world.
Complexity lies first of all in the factthat the structure and the
orthographical principles of these various scriptsare fundamentally
different. Kana and the Latin alphabet have in commonthe fact that
they are phonographic. However, the kana adopt as a basic unitthe
mora, while the alphabet is based on the phoneme. Chinese
characters,on the other hand, are primarily logographic
(ideographic) symbols, like theArabic numerals. Moreover, the way
Chinese characters are used in Japanesewriting is the source of
another complexity, since, as we shall see below,most characters
can be read in at least two fashions, depending mostly onthe
context in which they occur.
Tables 1.1 and 1.2 present the hiragana and katakana according
to thetraditional order of the gojonzu (#### table of the fifty
sounds4). As weshall see in more detail in Chapters 2, 3, and 4,
the core phonemic system ofJapanese consists of five vowels (a, i,
u, e, o) and fourteen consonants (p, b,t, d, k, g, s, z, h, m, n,
r, y, w). It will be noted that the combinations startingwith
p,b,d,z,g, which are derived from the corresponding unvoiced
kana
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letter by (p. 10 ) addition of a diacritic symbol, as well as
those comprisinga palatalization, do not appear here (we will
reconsider this point a littlefurther; a table of all the Japanese
moras is provided in Chapter 6, Table 6.1).
Hiragana mainly denote grammatical elements or elements with no
stablereferents such as enclitic particles, verbal and adjectival
inflexions, functionalnames, interjections, connectors, and a
number of adverbs. They aresometimes used to write lexical
morphemes that the scripter does not want(or does not know how) to
write in characters. Texts for children are thustranscribed
exclusively in hiragana, which are the first writing symbolstaught
to Japanese children.
Katakana are generally reserved for the transcription of recent
foreign loans.They are also sometimes used to write mimetic words,
the names of plantsor animals, dialectal or slang forms, and
sometimes also erudite words. Theymay also be employed to highlight
an element in a sentence, somewhat likethe italics in the Latin
alphabet script, to mark irony, or even to give a morecolloquial,
oral flavour to a text.
The modern versions of hiragana and katakana (Tables 1.1 and
1.2) comprise46 or 48 signs if one takes into account the two kana
denoting the moraswi and we that are in principle encountered only
in texts written prior to1946. The characteristic of the hiragana
and the katakana is initially, as theterm syllabary reflects, that
they transcribe syllables with the traditionalJapanese direction of
the term, that is, moras. A second characteristic isthat they use
diacritics rather than distinct letters to denote the
differencebetween voiceless and voiced obstruents. Another 58
additional morascan thus be written by the addition of a diacritic
symbol, or combinationof two existing kana. Voiced obstruents are
marked by two small strokes,the dakuten ## or nigoriten ###, placed
at the upper right corner of thematrix of a given kana (1a, see
also sections 3.7.1 on the correspondencebetween h and b, and
Chapter 4 on voicing in general). A comparable deviceis used to
represent the moras pa,pi, pu, pe, and po: a small circle,
thehandakuten ### (literally semi-voicing dot, 1b) is added at the
top of thekana transcribing the h series.
(1)a. Notation of obstruent voicing
t :d
tachitsu
###
:dajizu
###
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teto
##
dedo
##
s :z
sashisuseso
#####
:zajizuzezo
#####
k :g
kakikukeko
#####
:gagigugego
#####
h :b
hahihuheho
#####
:babibubebo
#####
b. Notation of moras starting with /p/h :p
hahihuheho#####
:papipupepo
#####
The palatalized combinations (kya,kyu, and so on) are
transcribed by addingonto the right side of a kana containing the
-i vowel the kana ya,yu, and yoin (p. 11 ) reduced size, as shown
below (in the following examples, capitalsare used to reflect
full-size kana, while small letters transcribe
reduced-sizekana):
(2)
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KI :KIya(kya)
SHI :SHIyu(shu)
CHI :CHIyo(cho)
# :##
# :##
# :##
Hiragana and katakana are indeed different scripts but they are
almostidentical as far as the principles that underlie their
internal structure,organization, and phonemic referential units are
concerned. The onlydifference between the two is a tiny one. It
lies in the fact that vocaliclength is not treated identically. In
katakana, it is uniformly representedby an horizontal line
(vertical in cases where the text is written from topto bottom),
while in hiragana, it is transcribed differently according to
thequality of the long vowel: the kana letter for u is added after
the morascontaining -u and -o when the length results from the fall
of a consonantfollowed by u (the most frequent case), the letter
for a is added after a, thatfor i after -e and -i. For instance
(here the hyphens mark mora boundaries):
(3)toukyou
Tky pronounced[tokjo]
writtenTO-U-KIyo-U
#####(##)
guuzen fortuity pronounced[zeN]
writtenGU-U-ZE-N
#### (##)
reisei calm pronounced[ese]
writtenRE-I-SE-I
#### (##)
There exist some particular uses, which one encounters, for
instance, incases of native Japanese words where the lengthening of
the long vowel [o]corresponds to the loss of a consonant originally
followed by o: the vocaliclength is noted in that case by means of
the letter o, as in the word ookii (#
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ohokii) large. One can also mention words like oneesan older
sister, whoselong vowel is written ee and not ei.
In katakana, vowel length is indicated by means of a horizontal
or verticalbar following the vowel (according to the direction of
the writing), whateverthe quality of the vowel concerned, for
example super suupaa ####.
The reduced-size kana tsu (# in hiragana and # in katakana) is
employedto write the first part of a non-nasal geminate consonant,
whatever it maybe. Thus atta ### had is noted A-tsu-TA in hiragana,
while katto ###cut {cut} is noted KA-tsu-TO in katakana.
Apart from rare exceptions, the kana spelling of Japanese words
is simpleand straightforward.
The Chinese characters, or kanji (##), are generally used to
write the non-variable part of lexical morphemes of Chinese or
Japanese origin. The stemof a flexional word of Japanese origin
such as a verb or an adjective is writtenby (p. 12 ) means of one
or several Chinese characters, while the variablepart is
transcribed in kana. Thus the kanji # represents the idea of
readingbut it can be read in different ways. As shown in the
examples in (4), # isemployed to represent the stable part of the
various inflected forms of theverb to read in Japanese and it is
read yo-, according to its native Japanesereading (kunyomi ###
meaning-reading). The endings which undergovariation will be noted
in hiragana. The same character # is also used incompound nouns
such as dokusha ## reader, tokuhon ## readingbook, koudoku ##
subscription, and many others, with the Sino-Japanesereading
(onyomi ### sound-reading) doku or toku. (Accents are ignored inthe
following examples.)
(4)yomu ## #.MU to
read
yonda ###
#.N.DA read(pasttense)
yomanai ####
#.MA.NA.I do(es)notread
dokusha ## reader
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tokuhon ## readingbook
koudoku ## subscription
It is generally considered that the knowledge of approximately
2000characters is sufficient for the reading of current Japanese
texts. However,this figure is extremely relative, and represents in
fact a minimumthreshold.5
The difficulty raised by the Japanese sinograms comes from the
fact that, onthe one hand, a character almost always has several
readings (see below,section 1.6.2), and that on the other hand, a
lexeme can almost always bewritten using different characters. For
instance, # is read yo-,doku, or toku.But the verb yomu to read can
be written ## or ##.
A written Japanese sentence is thus composed of an arrangement
of kanjiand kana, and it is not, moreover, uncommon that a text
contains somesequences in the Latin alphabet or Arabic numerals.
Texts are written fromtop to bottom vertically, starting from the
rightmost side of the page, orhorizontally, from left to right. One
occasionally encounters horizontalinscriptions, generally made up
of a couple of Chinese characters, writtenfrom right to left.
Each symbol (kana,kanji,rma-ji, or figure) is separated by a
blank. Theredoes not exist any special demarcating device to
separate words orsyntagms. It is thus only the alternation between
Chinese characters,hiragana, (p. 13 ) katakana, rma-ji, and Arabic
numerals, as well as the useof punctuation, that helps the
segmentation of the various elements of thesentence.
1.6 The Stratification of the Lexicon
The lexicon of Japanese is stratified into morphemes belonging
to differentclasses corresponding to distinct morpho-phonological,
semantic, andpragmatic systems. This organization is fundamental
for the descriptionand comprehension of Japanese as a whole.
Lexicon stratification plays acentral role in the grammar because
it entails major structural as well aspragmatic (register)
differences. Words belonging to different classes mayundergo
different rules or constraints. For instance, one of the
best-known,and most often cited, examples is rendaku (sequential
voicing), whichapplies differently according to the stratum (see
Chapter 4).
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Japanese linguistics traditionally distinguishes a minimum of
three lexicalclasses:
Wago ##, or Yamato lexemes, the class of native words
withinwhich one might possibly put the subclasses of the mimetic
wordsand other expressive words such as childish, familiar, or
slangvocabulary.
Kango ##, Sino-Japanese lexemes. They are loans from
Chineseintroduced massively in Japan starting from the fourth
century atleast. This class comprises many words of the erudite and
abstractvocabulary, as well as concepts and objects borrowed from
Chineseculture, but it also contains other more common, unmarked
items.
Gairaigo ###, which are lexemes that have been recentlyborrowed
from foreign languages, primarily Western languagesfrom the
sixteenth century. They contain mainly technical, scientificterms
or refer to modern objects and concepts with a
Westernconnotation.
It is sometimes useful to distinguish a fourth stratum, that of
mimetic words6:onomatopoeias (giseigo ###) and ideophones (gitaigo
###).
The overwhelming majority of mimetic words are etymologically of
nativeorigin.7 For this reason, they belong to the Yamato class in
the strict sense,even if (p. 14 ) they display a number of
properties which may lead one tocategorize them in a specific
subclass. In this book, when necessary, wewill make a distinction,
within the Yamato class, between non-mimetic andnon-expressive
words (the Yamato class stricto sensu), and mimetic andexpressive
words (a distinct class for some authors).
To the Yamato, Sino-Japanese, and Western strata, the class of
non-integrated foreign words (gaikokugo ###) is sometimes added.
Theseare words whose degree of adaptation into the Japanese
language is notas advanced as that of the gairaigo. They consist of
direct quotes from aWestern language in the Latin alphabet. Some
scholars also distinguishbetween formal Sino-Japanese and
vulgarized Sino-Japanese (Takayama,2005).
It is also necessary not to forget the existence of a mix or
hybrid class(konshugo ###), which comprises compounds made up of
words ormorphemes belonging to different classes, for instance wago
+ kango asin nimotsu luggage, kango + wago as in juu-bako
superposable mealbox, gairaigo + wago as in demoru to demonstrate
(in the streets) (fromdemo,demonsutoreeshon {demonstration} + -ru,
verbal suffix). Finally,
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note that a certain number of lexemes of Sanskrit, Ainu, or
other origins donot fall into any of these categories and have
unclear status as to the lexicalclass they belong to.
This partition is largely determined by etymology, but it would
be imprudentto adopt too narrow a vision and a simply historical
approach to the problem.Often, the supposed etymology is more
determining than the real one, andthe actual phonological profile
of the word plays a more important role thanits origin (not to
mention its semantic or pragmatic profiles). Actually,
thedifferences between the lexical classes are extremely delicate
to handle.First of all, it is difficult to establish with precision
the origin of certainlexemes. Second, we know almost nothing about
the history of the Japaneselanguage before the fifth century, and
in particular we are ignorant of thetrue nature of the contacts
between the spoken language in Japan and thespoken language(s) in
the Korean peninsula or elsewhere. One should alsotake into account
the fact that loans from foreign languages (especially fromChinese)
have had a deep influence and have considerably modified
themorpho-phonology of the Yamato lexemes. Moreover, it is not
unusual thatthe linguistic intuitions of non-linguist speakers
regarding which lexical classa given lexeme belongs to are in clear
contradiction with the true etymology.For example shio salt or mugi
wheat are actually very old loans fromChinese, but they are handled
and behave like Yamato words. The sameapplies to kappa raincoat or
kasutera pound cake, which are words ofPortuguese origin but
treated as Yamato lexemes. Which is more important,the etymological
data or speakers intuitions? As Takayama (2005) observes,in order
to determine the lexical stratum to which a given word belongs,
onehas to consider both word forms (phonotactic patterns) and
connotation,that is, (p. 15 ) whether the word is culturally
associated with a foreignbackground. I would add that the writing
may constitute another strong clueto determining which stratum a
word belongs to.
Lastly, it will be necessary to question the manner this
partition is acquiredby Japanese children. It is not clear whether
native speakers acquire thisintuition through education, especially
the knowledge of Chinese charactersand of the difference between
Sino-Japanese and Japanese readings ofthe characters, and
acquisition of katakana and hiragana (remember thatkatakana are
used primarily for the notation of Western loanwords, whilekanji
and kana are used to transcribe Yamato and Sino-Japanese words),or
if it is of a deeper, truly linguistic nature. Probably, both
dimensionsare involved, and education only serves to reinforce and
stabilize a robustdifference. How does the child manage to
internalize the difference between
-
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Yamato words, Sino-Japanese words, and Western words? Is this
knowledgeof a metalinguistic nature, that is, acquired through
education and literacy,and particularly thanks to the mastering of
the writing system? Ota (2004)provides a good discussion of the
issue of the learnability of lexicon partitionin Japanese, and
points out the unrealistic scenario of phonological learningthat is
implied by OT constraint-based models (It and Mester, 1995a, b;
Itand Mester, 1999; It, Mester, and Padgett, 1999, for
instance).
In spite of these problems, the partition of the lexicon plays a
key role inthe grammar of the language. It is conveyed in the
writing, and constitutesan important component of the
metalinguistic knowledge of any Japanesespeaker. In principle,
Yamato words are written in hiragana or kanji,kango inkanji, and
gairaigo in katakana. However, a well-integrated gairaigo can
bewritten in hiragana or even in kanji, and a yamatoized kango can
end upbeing written only in hiragana.
According to the statistics provided by the Shinsen Kokugo Jiten
dictionary(8th edition, 2002), wago represent 33.8% of the entries
of the dictionary,kango 49.1%, gairaigo 8.8%, and hybrid words
8.4%. The words of Chineseorigin are thus the most numerous in the
lexicon. In textual frequency(corpus of the written language drawn
from the press) the proportions areroughly similar with respect to
type frequency (KKK, 1964). On the otherhand, wago are most
frequent in speech: 46.9% compared with 40% for thekango (Hayashi
O., 1982). The proportion of wago goes up to 71.8% in
tokenfrequency. This is evidently explained by the fact that words
of the basiclexicon, and those that fulfil a grammatical function
(auxiliaries, particles,etc.), which are frequently repeated,
almost all belong to the Yamato class.Moreover, some studies have
shown that the proportions between the stratacould vary according
to the sex of the speakers. The survey by Tsuchiya(1965) reveals
indeed that kango are employed more (p. 16 ) frequently bymale than
by female speakers, at least at the time of the investigation.
It is frequently the case that the same referent can be referred
to by a wago,a kango, or a gairaigo, for instance:
(5)Wago Kango Gairaigo
tegami##
/shokan##
/retaa###
letter,missive
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meshi#
/gohan##
/raisu###
rice
odori##
/buyou##
/dansu###
dance
However, the three lexemes in each set have different
connotations, andsometimes also semantic specializations. The kango
are generally felt tobe more formal, more precise, and belonging to
a higher register than thewago or the gairaigo. The gairaigo
generally refer to Western realities. Forexample, dansu can only
refer to a Western type of dance, contrary toodori and buyou, and
raisu designates some rice presented or cookedin a Western way. But
there are exceptions. For instance, the word kappunuudoru {cup
noodle} (originally a trade mark) indicates an instantaneousnoodle
dish cooked in an Asian manner. Here, the connotation brought in
bythe use of gairaigo is modernity. The gairaigo also tend to refer
to concrete,material entities, whereas kango are preferred for the
abstract (Loveday,1996). In addition, gairaigo frequently appear as
compound formatives. Forexample retaa is more often used in
expressions such as rabu retaa {loveletter} or retaa peepaa {letter
paper} than in isolation.
1.6.1 Wago
In its diachronic sense, the term Yamato refers to the original,
nativeJapanese language with no elements of Chinese or from any
other foreignorigin. The most operational definition of what a
Yamato word is seems to beas follows: a Yamato morpheme is a
morpheme which does not result from aloan posterior to the fifth
century of our era.8
In the old language, the following properties were
characteristic of Yamatowords:
structure of the basic prosodic unit = V or CV; prohibition of
hiatus (onsetless vowels were allowed only word
initially);
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absence of words starting with a voiced obstruent (/b/, /d/,
/g/, /z/)or with /r/;
impossibility of having two voiced obstruents, or two /r/,
withinthe same root;
(p. 17 ) scarcity of the /e/ vowel, in particular at the
beginning ofwords longer than two moras;
existence of vowel harmony; simplex lexemes from two to three
mora long.
Most of these characteristics remain today only as a residue. In
modernJapanese, words of Yamato origin are characterized by the
absence of /p/, the absence of /h/ in word internal position, the
impossibility of findinggeminated voiced obstruents and geminated
/r/, and by the constraineddistribution of voiceless consonants
after the mora nasal /N/. One will alsonote the scarcity of
palatalized consonants.
Whenever the same referent can be referred to either by a lexeme
of Yamatoor Sino-Japanese origin, the connotations brought in by
the Yamato wordare generally associated with the register of
intimacy, the expression ofsensations and emotions. They are also
considered more poetic than Sino-Japanese or Western words, and
constitute the core lexicon of Japanesetraditional poetry
(haiku,tanka).
1.6.2 Kango
Sino-Japanese words, or kango (##), are words which are written
using oneor more Chinese characters pronounced in a Sino-Japanese
manner. Kangoare words (go #), but they are above all meaningful
written units associatedwith one or more Sino-Japanese readings. If
the character correspondingto a word of Chinese origin is no longer
used to write the word, it becomesdifficult to regard the word in
question as a kango. One can mention the caseof the lexeme sei
fault, reason, which, in spite of its Chinese origin, is
neverwritten in characters (##) in contemporary Japanese, or the
word sesse to,assiduously (##(Nakada and Hayashi, 1982).
Consequently, most Japanesespeakers are surprised to learn that
these words are actually kango.
Many kango are jukugo (##), that is, Sino-Japanese compound
words madeup of two to four kanji. A majority of one-character (one
kanji) Sino-Japaneselexemes only occur as bound morphs, that is, as
components of a jukugo,and never occur in an autonomous way, like
sho # write in tosho ## bookor shokan ## letter. However, a few
one-character kango (ichiji kango ##
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##) also function as autonomous words, like hon # book, niku #
meat, orki # spirit.
In the modern language, kango lexemes are often characterized by
thefollowing phonological properties:
presence of many palatalized consonants; presence of mora
nasals; presence of geminations (only in compound kango); presence
of long vowels; (p. 18 ) absence of non-geminated /p/; absence of
geminated voiced obstruents; morpheme (stem) length from one to two
moras.
Here are typical kango lexemes: gakkou ## school, nippon ##
Japan,gyuuniku ## beef, shuukyou ## religion.
Sino-Japanese morphemes are organized around a vowel, possibly
precededby a consonant, palatalized or not. This group may be
followed by a moranasal (noted /N/), by a vocalic length (noted
/R/), by a front high vowel /i/, orby an extra mora containing /t/
or /k/ followed by the vowels /i/ or /u/. Thisstructure can be
synthesized with the following formula where the symbolsbetween the
braces indicate non obligatory elements:
(6)Examples:
/hoN/ hon
/koR/ kou
/ai/ ai
/botu/ botsu, /kiti/ kichi, /kyaku/kyaku, /teki/ teki9
Thus one has: i # stomach, ya # house, ki # spirit, ryo #
travel, un #fate, man # ten thousand, jun /zyuN/ # pure, sou /soR/
# grass, kyou /kyoR/ # to teach, nai # inside, botsu /botu/ #
rejection, kyaku # guest,kichi /kiti/ # good fortune, reki #
passing of time, and so on.
Loans from Chinese were made through three successive waves from
theend of Antiquity, over a vast period covering nearly one
thousand years, andstarting at least from the fourth century
onwards. This is the reason why itis not uncommon for a given
character to have two or even three different
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Sino-Japanese readings (onyomi ###). According to Vance
(1987:169),about 13% of the 1850 currently used kanji have more
than one Sino-Japanese pronunciation. In addition, the majority of
kanji also have at leastone native Japanese reading (kunyomi ###).
The different types of Sino-Japanese readings are:
the go readings (or Wu readings, goon ##), which are linked
tothe introduction of Buddhism in Japan and correspond to loansmade
during the fifth and sixth centuries, probably via Korea. Theexact
geographic source is not always clear, but it seems to havebeen
somewhere in Southern China, near the mouth of the
Yangtzeriver.
the kan readings (or Han readings, kanon ##), which are by
farthe most important. They correspond to loans dating back to
theseventh and eighth (p. 19 ) centuries. Kanon are derived from
thepronunciation of the Tang capital Changan (presently Xian).
the t readings (or Tang readings, tin or ton ##,
sometimesreferred to as son ## or tson ###). They concern
laterborrowings, from different Chinese provinces, which
explainswhy they are less homogeneous from the point of view of
theirpronunciation.
To this list, one should add the so-called usage readings
(kanyon ###),which correspond to alterations of kan or t readings,
and which representirregular Sino-Japanese evolutions from the
original Chinese pronunciations(see Vance, 1987:167ff. for a
presentation in English, and Nakada andHayashi, 2000 in Japanese).
One should also add a couple of loans datingback to a period
earlier than the fifth century such as uma horse, e (# we)picture,
or kinu silk, which have been perfectly adapted to the
Yamatophonology, so that nothing in their phonological structure
hints at the factthat they are indeed words of Chinese origin.
Hence, they are often regardedas Yamato words.
So a given character is likely to possess several different
Sino-Japanesereadings (onyomi ###). Some characters only have one
Sino-Japanesereading, generally the kan reading, some have two, a
kan and a go reading,and a small number of characters even have
three, four, or even morereadings, since there may be several
kan,go,t, and usage readings attachedto a single character. Most
speakers are not capable of saying whethera given pronunciation is
go,kan,t, or usage. It seems that they simplymemorize the different
Sino-Japanese readings of a given character, and thecontexts in
which each reading is employed. Here are some examples, which
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illustrate some of the different cases one is likely to
encounter, and whichprovide an idea of the complexity of the issue
(Old Chinese reconstructionsare from Td, 1996):
(7)#
mirror#north
#clearness
#togo
#tenthousand
#various
#tosupply
Goreading
hoku myou# myau
gyou# gyau
mon nou# nahu
Kanreading
kan# kamu
hoku mei kou# kau
ban zou dou# dahu
Treading
an zou# zahu
na
Usagereading
man zatsu,zou
tou# tahu,nan
OldCh.
*klm *puk *m *h *mun *dzp *np
(p. 20 ) There are other alternations typical of Sino-Japanese
lexemes, whichhave a more synchronic and morpho-phonemic status,
such as the CV/Qalternation, the i/u alternation, the h/p
alternation, and so forth. Those will beaddressed in the relevant
chapters of this book.
The Sino-Japanese lexicon is rich in possibilities of lexical
creation evenif, at the present time, those are not as exploited as
they used to be. Thisis because, nowadays, gairaigo constitute
another privileged source ofword-coining. Note also that a fair
number of the kango currently in useare actually Japanese lexical
creations (rather like neo-classical compoundswith Greek or Latin
roots are in European languages). These are calledwasei kango ####
Chinese words coined in Japan. This practice of lexicalcreation has
been attested since the Heian period. These new lexemes
aregenerally pure neologisms (for example denwa ## telephone), but
theymay also represent the semantic calques of existing Yamato
words. Forexample kaji ## fire is simply the Sino-Japanese reading
of the Yamatoexpression hi no koto ###. During the Meiji era,
literal translations ofwords belonging to Western languages by way
of Chinese characters wereextremely common, like byouin ##
hospital, a calquing from Dutch zieken-huis (illness + public
house, cited by Loveday, 1996:71). These neologisms
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containing Chinese characters have frequently made their way
back toModern Chinese or Korean, where they have received the
correspondingSino-Korean or Modern Chinese readings.
In comparison to Yamato and Western lexemes, kango are
considered tobelong to a more formal and learned register. They
correlate with intellect,distance, authority, formality, and are
used in juridical, academic, orscientific texts, in preference to
Yamato words when the alternative exists.
1.6.3 Gairaigo
What is a gairaigo? It is generally a word that has been
borrowed in Japaneseafter the sixteenth century, and mainly during
the twentieth century, froma language which does not use Chinese
characters. For example tabako tobacco, cigarette (Portuguese
{tabaco}), misa mass (Latin {missa}through Portuguese), zubon /
zubon trousers (French {jupon}), meetoru metre (French {mtre}),
biiru beer (Dutch {bier}), arubaito (student)job (German {Arbeit}),
interi intellectual (Russian {intelligentsija}), bataabutter
(English {butter}). It may also bealthough more rarelya
wordborrowed recently from a modern Asian language using Chinese
characterslike Chinese or Korean, but in Japanese the loan has kept
a pronunciationwhich is close to that of the source language. That
means that even if theword can be written in sinograms, those will
not be read according to theconventional Sino-Japanese reading but
with a pronunciation which attemptsto be faithful to that of the
(p. 21 ) modern source language, for instancemaajan / maajan
mahjong (from a Chinese dialect, this word was borrowedat the
beginning of the twentieth century), chongaa old boy
(Korean{chhonggak}), kochujan pepper paste (Korean {kochhujang}).
Lastly, it isimportant to mention that some gairaigo are nothing
more than lexical formscoined by the Japanese, and involving
Western roots. They are made upeither by combining morphemes
existing in one or more foreign languagesor by truncating a
borrowed form. Japanese lexicographers call these waseieigo ####
(English word created in Japan) or wasei ygo #### (Westernword
created in Japan). They are usually written in katakana. Such
wordsare extremely numerous, for example sarariiman {salaryman} a
companyworker, gouruden-wiiku {golden week} a succession of several
holidaysaround the end of April or beginning of May, woukuman
{walkman}, naitaa{nighter} night game (baseball), paso-kon
(abbreviation of {personalcomputer}) personal computer, depaato
(abbreviation of {departmentstore}) department store.
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It is also necessary to mention acronyms and
Latin-alphabet-based creations,which also constitute a source of
derivation and lexical coinage. The basisfor a number of acronyms
are Yamato or Sino-Japanese morphemes, whoseinitial letter in the
Latin alphabet is used for acronymization: Nippon HousouKyoukai
###### -# NHK / enu-ecchi-kee NHK (Japan BroadcastingCorporation),
hentai ## -# H / etchi pervert, ofisu redii -# OL / ou erufemale
employee.
The gairaigo often display phonotactic combinations that are not
found inwago or kango (see section 3.14). They can also be very
long, and containmany long vowels and geminate consonants.
Gairaigo are used primarily to refer to new objects, or to
concepts borrowedfrom foreign cultures. They are particularly
frequent in the fields of fashionand cosmetics, sport, non
traditional arts, gastronomy, technology, andsciences. There often
exists a native Japanese or Sino-Japanese equivalentof a gairaigo.
The use of a gairaigo can also be dictated by pragmatic
orstylistics factors. The connotations associated with this
vocabulary are:the West, modernity, innovation, and also in certain
cases refinement andsophistication.
It might be necessary to distinguish gairaigo, which are
Japanized foreignloans, written in katakana, pronounced in a
Japanese way, and likely tobe integrated in a Japanese sentence
like any Yamato or Sino-Japaneselexeme, from gaikokugo ###, which
are borrowed wholesale from a foreignlanguage. Gaikokugo are
written in the alphabet and their pronunciationis not yet
Japanized. Their lexical categorization also remains fuzzy.
Suchnon-integrated loans are generally used in advertisements,
without beingintegrated into a sentence. They are still at the
margins of the language.
(p. 22 ) It follows from this definition that in Japanese, a
gairaigo, literally aword coming from the outside, is not
necessarily a foreign wordmanygairaigo are Japanese lexical
creations, or Japenglishand that the majorgroup of lexemes of
foreign origin, namely the kango, do not belong to thecategory of
gairaigo.
1.6.4 Other Types
Japanese also contains a number of words of Sanskrit origin,
most of whichpertain to the Buddhist vocabulary. These words were
often borrowed viaChinese: for example kawara {kapla} tile, daruma
{(bodhi-) dharma}, ordanna {dna} master, husband.
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Words of Ainu origin, for example sake or shake {sakipe #
sakuipe} salmon(literally summer food), kaba, kanba {kaniha} birch,
rakko, rakko{rakko} sea otter, have dubious status. Certain
lexicologists classify themamong Yamato words, others among the
gairaigo. The difference generallycomes from the epoch at which the
loan was made: the older it is, the morelikely the word will be
regarded as a wago. It is necessary finally to mentiona number of
prehistoric loans from Korean, such as kushi {kusil} a comb,a spit
or tera {tSl} temple. These words are generally considered to
beYamato words. From the morpho-phonological point of view, they do
notdisplay any particular characteristic which distinguishes them
from Yamatowords.
1.6.5 The Limits of Stratum Categorization
The formal boundaries between wago,kango, and gairaigo tend to
attenuateas time goes by, through a process of lexicon
homogenization. Thus thecharacteristics that were originally
specific to kango, such as palatalization,the presence of the mora
nasal /N/, gemination, the presence of the /r/consonant or of a
voiced obstruent word-initially, ended up extending towords of the
Yamato stratum. The presence of these elements thus nolonger
constitutes, in itself, a proof that a word is of Chinese origin,
even ifit remains generally possible to determine the origin of a
lexeme just by itsphonological structure. On the other hand, most
gairaigo, especially mostrecent ones, generally have a phonological
structure which makes themimmediately identifiable as such. But the
oldest gairaigo or the ones whichare in very frequent or daily use
are more Japanized than those of morerecent introduction or those
less frequently employed.
The classes are thus not discontinuous. They are organized
rather like acontinuum: certain words belonging etymologically to
one of the classescan move to another one, or borrow in a more or
less occasional waysome of its morpho-phonological features.
Certain words do not have thephonological, orthographical, or
semantic profile of their true etymology,and they belong de facto
to some other class than to the one that historyshould have
confined them. (p. 23 ) For instance, kappa raincoat is anold loan
from Portuguese, which is treated as a wago since it
undergoesrendaku (sequential voicing) in the compound words
ama-gappa raincoat orbiniiru-gappa rainwear made of plastic
(Takayama T., 2005). Niku meat isoriginally a Sino-Japanese word,
but it takes a Yamato polite prefix o-, insteadof go- normally used
as the polite prefix of Sino-Japanese words. The readingyo / yon
for the numeral # four is etymologically a Yamato word, but it
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is chosen instead of the Sino-Japanese reading shi four in many
numeralcompounds using Sino-Japanese components (for instance
yo-nin rather than*shi-nin ## four persons), so that it behaves
like a Sino-Japanese word.Finally, let us mention the word kouhii
#### coffee, a Dutch loan {koffie},which is sometimes written in
kanji (##) instead of katakana. The effectiveplacing of a lexeme in
such or such a class can also vary according to thespeaker. Thus
there do not exist absolute criteria to determine which classa
lexeme belongs to. In many cases, whether an item belongs to a
givenstratum or not cannot be determined on the basis of surface
distributionpatterns (Ota, 2004). For instance, there is nothing in
the surface phonologyof the Yamato word tonbo dragonfly which
suggests that it does not belongto the same stratum as tenba flying
horse, which is a Sino-Japanese word,or konbo combo, a Western
borrowing. The script is often one of the crucialelements for
native speakers, alongside the phonological characteristics ofthe
word.
It and Mester (1995a, 1999) have proposed a concentric model, or
coreperiphery organization of the lexicon, whose internal
structuring is governedby the interaction of constraints. The
lexicon is viewed as an abstract spacewith a core and a periphery.
At the periphery stand the lexical items whichare least assimilated
(gairaigo and gaikokugo), in the centre, the nativelexemes
(Yamato). Sino-Japanese lexemes appear in intermediate position.In
this model, the maximum set of lexical constraints holds in the
core lexicaldomain, occupied by lexical items traditionally
labelled as Yamato. It andMester (1995b) propose a slightly
different implementation of this view. Theypostulate that all
lexical items obey the same markedness constraints butthat there
exist different versions of stratum-specific faithfulness
constraints.The constraints which demands faithfulness for Yamato
words are rankedlower than those demanding faithfulness for kango,
which in turn are lowerthan those demanding faithfulness to
gairaigo. So as the peripheral zoneof the lexicon is approached,
many of the constraints cease to hold (areturn