Re: 'Tefu-tefu' read as 'Choo-choo'

Zhen Lin wrote:
> Bart Mathias wrote:
>
>>Kind of an odd thing to say. You're talking about an example where the
>>long "o" was spelt "-eu," and the spelling "(-)ahu" was just mentioned.
>> Maybe you meant "all the long お [except those that came from "-opo"]
>>were already spelt with う"? ("Long お”doesn't work any better than 長
>>いお, by the way.)
>
>
>
> I was thinking more of オー that were spelt オウ even in old orthography
> - 欧、応、翁 etc.
>
> Similarly for エー - plenty of examples of エイ in old orthography too:
> 栄、英、映、永 etc.
>
> If the question is why it was オウ and エイ even in old orthography...
> well, I think that it is because these sounds were not pronounced オー
> and エー initially, but rather as diphthongs.

My guess is they weren't diphthongs originally--they might have even
been "felt" by Japanese speakers as "owu" and "eyi"--then went through a
brief stage as diphthongs, which Japanese, and Korean, abhor. Sam
Martin (and everyone else?) apparently disagrees with me on this; he
holds that words like こい in NJ *are* diphthongs.

> A slightly more interesting question would be why the -ng of Chinese
> became ウ or イ in Japanese...

Well, they didn't *all* become ウ or イ. Some of the early ones have
"g." 相 as サガ and サグ, 興 as コゴ, 望 as マガ/マグ, for example.
(These occur mostly in place names, such as 相楽山 [さがらかやま], 相模,
etc., in my limited experience.)

My guess (don't I always have a wild guess?) is that after the "echo
vowel" method of making Chinese finals pronounceable was given up in
favor of attaching "i" or "u," the least sonorant vowels, that 相 became
*/sagu/, 性 became */segi/, and then the sort of thing that would happen
so often to "ku" and "ki" (yoki --> yoi, hayaku --> hayau, etc.) got an
early start with all of these "gi"s and "gu"s.

Never could think of enough to say on those lines to turn it into a
research paper.

Bart
.

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