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

Nik Taylor wrote:

>Also, what about the voicing diacritic?  Based on my (admittedly scanty)
>knowledge of Japanese, it appears that voicing was perhaps once
>allophonic?  If so, what was the original conditioning factor?
Part of voicing still is allophonic, but not all of it.  Originally there
was a restriction that there could only be one voiced consonant per
word.  That condition doesn't hold anymore due to influences from Chinese
and English among others.  The allophany you're referring to (I think) is
what the Japanese call rendaku.  When native Japanese compounds (or words
that are felt to be Japanese rather than borrowings), you voice the first
consonant of the second element.  Thus kana > hira-gana.  There are lots of
conditions on when this can apply, but the short of it is that the voicing
in these contexts is allophonic to this day.



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Marcus Smith
AIM:  Anaakoot
"When you lose a language, it's like
dropping a bomb on a museum."
   -- Kenneth Hale
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