Re: Japanese Long Consonants

On Fri, 29 Oct 2004 00:53:28 -0400, Roger Mills <rfmilly@...> wrote:
> how did they actually arise historically? From clusters? For ex., IIRC
> "Nippon" is a compound of two Chinese words-- something like ni- '???' + pun
> 'origin'(?) Perhaps the ni- part ended originally in a C?
*nods*. It's "yat" in Cantonese IIRC, so I suppose something like
"nit" may be likely, or possibly "ni?".

AFAIK, final stops in Chinese were all three of -p -t -k; final -p
often becomes -u (< -fu < -pu) in Japanese, -t becomes -tsu or -chi,
and -k often becomes -ku; -tsu -chi -ku are the most common endings
turning into double consonants in compounds, though -ku turns into
-kk- only if the next bit starts with k-, I believe. (For example,
gakkou "school" from characters pronounced, in isolation, gaku + kou.)

> How about long nasals,
I'm not sure whether that counts, but /nn/ sequences do occur, but
AFAIK they're limited to cases where one morpheme ends in /-n/ and the
next begins with /n-/, and they're never written with smalltsu.

> long /s/?
This does exist (e.g. kissaten "café"), and is written with smalltsu.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
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