Re: THEORY: final features, moras, and roots [was: it's what I do]

On Wed, 4 Oct 2000 12:11:44 EDT, Togonakamane@AOL.COM wrote:

>In a message dated 10/3/00 10:05:55 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
>fortytwo@GDN.NET writes:
>
>> Speaking of which, how did _tu_ come to be used as a gemination marker?
>
>well, let's see.....the "t/ts" part I leave to someone with a better idea
>of why, given that my best involves "t" being as stoppy a stop as I can
>think of.
>But the "u" in it probably has a lot to do with the fact that "u" is the
>general default vowel for borrowed words with two consonants together or
>one on the end, where the first isn't "n": the phrase "apple pie" becomes
>"apuru pai" or maybe "appuru pai" (the first p there would be represented
>by the little tsu character we're talking about- the l->r is because
>Japanese has no l). And "u", in certain positions (such as s-#, and
>between many of the same stops the little tsu doubled consonant character
>works on- r is not, incidentally, one of them) is pronounced much shorter,
>sometimes left off entirely (good example: "deska" being considered the
>way you ask certain questions by many people... there is no "deska"--
>there's not even a way to write "deska" in Japanese characters-- there's
>really "desu ka" with an almost silent "u".) So I bet that's why it's from
>the u column of characters, though why they chose the t line is beyond me.
I think part of the reason is that a lot of the Chinese words borrowed
originally ended in /t/. When at the end of a word, the Japanese added u or
i, but when the /t/ occurred as the first (or non-final) part of a compound
word (with the next part beginning with /p/, /t/, /k/, or /s/), the /t/
assimilated. Then, when the Japanese developed characters for pronunciation
(I always forget which is hiragana and which is katakana!), they used the
same character for the /t/, regardless of the circumstances.

Jeff Jones,
Non-Japanese Non-Linguist