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

Bart Mathias wrote: 
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.


N.J.? Nara Japanese? こい as in 来い? I thought 来い was a more modern
development... I'm confused...

Anyway. Interestingly, in modern Mandarin - there is no [o:] or [e:] but
there are [7U] ([7] = close-mid back unrounded vowel, similar to [@])
and [eI] (analysed as [@] nucleus + [u] coda for [7U] and [@] + [i] for
[eI]). Modern Cantonese also has no [o:] or [e:] (but it has [O:], [O] =
open-mid back rounded vowel) - it has instead [ou] and [ei].

Aah. I wish I had a computerised comparative phonology database of 漢
字... (I also wish information on Chinese and Korean diachronics were
easier to find on the Internet.)

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.)


Hmm hmm hmm, very interesting. (Especially サガ and コゴ - I would have
imagined サグ and コグ.)

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


Are there more examples of this? And how does テラ (assuming the from
Korean 절 hypothesis) fit into this scheme? [Come to think of it, I'm
wondering why ラリルレロ is used in katakana orthography of Ainu for the
-r final instead of only ル. And why yukar was imported as ユーカラ
instead of as ユーカル or ユカル.]

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.


My personal hypothesis is that they came over as nasalised /i/ and /u/,
and that the nasalisation was later lost. (Do the dialects with 読うだ
and 飛うだ have a nasalised /u/? What of 並うだ?)

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


You must have accumulated enough sketches of theories and conjectures to
compile them into a book. Perhaps use it as a problem set for postgrad
students to solve...
.