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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

Jeff

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