Re: Japanese Long Consonants

>
> From: Roger Mills <rfmilly@...>
> Date: 2004/10/28 Thu PM 04:31:38 GMT
> To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU
> Subject: Re: Japanese Long Consonants
>
> Chris Bates wrote:
>
> > I've read that Japanese Long consonants are actually a glottal stop and
> > another consonant together, 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).
>
> In the languages of South Sulawesi (Indonesia) that I worked with, the
> geminate stops could be realized as either [?C] or [C:]; for voiceless stops
> it was hard to hear much difference; for the voiced ones, a quite noticeable
> difference, and the [C:] version was considered "more elegant".
Well, I am planning on ditching the glottal stops at some point, I simply want them
to generate certain phonological changes as the language evolves, and also to
explain peculiarities in the writing system. :)

>
>  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.
>
> In the SSul languages, there was correlation between long vowel + 1
> consonant, vs. short vowel + geminate, so: /sapa/ ['sa:pa] vs. /sappa/
> ['sa?pa ~ 'sap:a]. But syllable weight/mora distinctions were not
> significant there, as they may be in Japanese.
>
> Some other language might very well have the long C conditioned by the short
> vowel, however.
>
Thanks for the examples. At least I know that the system I'm proposing is semi
plausable. Can these long stops occur without a preceding vowel though? The
system I've suggested is such that you can't get "long" consonants except post
vocally, mainly because of my own difficulty pronouncing consonant clusters
with glottal stops in the middle of them.

>
> 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
>
> Something similar occurs in various Indonesian languages, usually after the
> schwa vowel (or its reflex), so it's possible to have e.g. /sara/ < *sada
> vs. /sada/ < *s@da.  It suggests that there was something phonologically
> "odd" about the historic *@ (which is indeed the cause of most of the
> gemination in the SSul languages)
>
Again, thanks. :)

> Of course a phonemic [?C ~C:] can arise from old consonant clusters too, if
> your lang. is going to permit them. Example: Bugis sad:a ~sa?da 'voice' <
> **sabda (Saskrit); Makassarese je?ne 'water' probably cognate with Ml.
> j@rnih 'clear'; it also seems to account for some irregularities in Tagalog:
> araw 'sun, day' (it "ought" to be *alaw) vs. related langs. aldaw, adlaw,
> presumably < PPh. **aldaw (AN *al@jaw, where the *al- _may_ be a prefix)
>
Since most of the glottal stops are going to vanish in the future, as the main
reason I want them is to explain certain sound changes and peculiarities in the
writing system, I don't think I'll have such a contrast, but the loss of the
glottal stops might produce true long consonants in some situations. :)

> > 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.
>
> Yes indeed; geminate/long consonants are fun.
>
> 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.
> >
> Is that true, O Japanophones? If so, I wonder why.
>
-----------------------------------------
Email provided by http://www.ntlhome.com/