Re: Japanese Long Consonants

>
> From: Jeffrey Jones <jsjonesmiami@...>
> Date: 2004/10/28 Thu PM 06:41:42 GMT
> To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU
> Subject: Re: Japanese Long Consonants
>
> On Thu, 28 Oct 2004 16:45:52 +0100, Chris Bates
> <chris.maths_student@...> wrote:
> >
> > I've read that Japanese Long consonants are actually a glottal stop and
> > another consonant together,
>
> Not in any Japanese that I've ever heard (admittedly limited to Japanese
> classes 20+ years ago, and mostly older people), but that doesn't affect
> your conlang proposal. Glottal stop + consonant could be used and long
> consonants could be derived from that. Japanese long consonants come mainly
> from /t/ + consonant AFAICT.
Guess I was wrong then. :) I found a webpage that claimed that after seeing it
written on the Japanese page on Wikipedia and looking it up.

>
> > which I guess is why I find it easier to hear the difference in Japanese
> > than in a language like Hungarian (where the long consonants aren't
> > formed by adding glottal stops). I was thinking of introducing into a
> > language a system of three accents:
> >
> > unaccented eg i       short
> > acute accent eg í      long
> > grave accent eg ì     short, terminated by glottal stop.
> >
> > So for instance I guess nippon written using this system would be nìpon.
> > But I'm not sure about this... I'm not sure if I should have long vowels
> > that can terminate with a glottal stop as well.
>
> If you do, you could use the circumflex.
>
THat's what I was thinking, but to be honest I'm not sure I want to do long vowels +
glottal stops. My brain keeps trying to cut them off early and make them short.

> > I was thinking that this system could let me do some interesting sound
> > changes... like for instance, d   ->   D   inside words, like in spanish,
> > but the change is blocked by a glottal stop (which later gets dropped),
> > so I could have:
> >
> > d after any vowel without a grave accent:                D
> > d word initially or after a vowel with a grave accent:   d
> >
> > Since these might be contrasted in some pairs, it wouldn't just be a
> > phonetic rule. I was thinking of a whole raft of similar changes I could
> > do that the glottal stops would influence, so the accents would alter
> > the pronounciation of the following consonant as well as the length of
> > the vowel.
>
> This also suggests a possibility for an initial mutation. I've done
> something vaguely like this in Rubaga. I mean using accent marks on the
> vowel to indicate consonant quality as well as vowel length, although there
> was no glottal stop involved.
>
That was part of my plan. :) The language I'm designing has something of a trigger
system, and I'm also introducing mutations etc... I'm going for a
Tagalog/Welsh/a few bits from other languages hybrid, which I tried once years
ago but didn't quite finish to my satisfaction.

> > Although... Japanese doesn't allow "long" voiced stops I don't think,
> > although if I'm doing them right I don't have any problem pronouncing
> > them.
>
> Japanese *does* allow them, e.g. beddo -- a Western style bed (IIRC), even
> if they don't occur in native words. And I've seen "rr" in SinoJapanese.
>

That's okay then. :)

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