Re: Allophony
| From: | Kenji Schwarz <schwarz@...> |
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| Date: | Saturday, November 6, 1999, 19:41 |
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On Sat, 6 Nov 1999, Nik Taylor wrote:
> Also speaking of Japanese, I read on a web page about Japanese that it's
> believed that Japanese once had eight vowels, but the other three were
> listed as /i"/, /o"/, and /e"/. I would suppose that /o"/ would be
> fronted /o/, but what would the other two represent? Centralized
> vowels, maybe?
The Old Japanese (reconstructed) vowels that are customarily reprsented
with umlauts are NOT fronted. The mark was originally meant just as a
diacritic to distinguish them from the "other" /i o e/, and wasn't meant
to suggest a particular phonetic shape. Unfortunately, this hasn't always
been noticed by people using O.J. reconstructions for other work.
Kenji