Re: Allophony

On Sat, 6 Nov 1999, Eric Christopherson wrote:

> Speaking of Japanese, does anyone know how /tu/ became [tsM] ([M] is an
> unrounded [u])? I had thought maybe the /M/ was originally a front vowel,
> but then how does one account for the presence of /i/?
This assumes that the vowel indicated by the romanization as <u>
is in fact [u] underlyingly. I don't know that this is the case
in Japanese; it may just be [M]. Historically, though, there may
be arguments to assume that [M] was once [u], but everything
I've seen on Japanese phonology assumes that [M] is now the
synchronic underlying vowel.

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu                 "All grammars leak."
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~elzinga/               -Edward Sapir