Re: "G" Pronunciation: Is it hard word initialy or utterance initially?

Paul D wrote:

Perhaps compounds where k turns to g for euphony (e.g. chuugoku)
provide more examples of the hard g.


It seems a little odd to call that "euphony"--does "chuugoku" really
sound better than "chuukoku"?

I don't know about better, but it sounds more like a unified word when
the initial consonant of the second kanji is vocalized like that. I
thought that might count as an example of euphony.

I can even think of a (weak) argument to support the "unified word"
idea, but in the long run I think one has to accept the fact that the
word for "advice; cautioning" too can only be taken as a unified word.

It seems to me that I have probably encountered things like "kakita" -->
"kaita" = "scratched, wrote" as "euphonic changes" and not been
disturbed by them. Now that sounds weird to me, too. Most such changes
make things easier to *say*, not nicer to hear.

But if you could compile solid evidence to
support that idea, I guarantee you would have a paper publishable in
linguistics journals. Right now we all believe there's no difference.
(Many believe that *all* native Japanese "g" started out as "k," that
being part of the reason no words started with "g.")

I know nothing about Old Japanese, but that sort of makes sense to me.
Is the idea that voiced consonants developed from their unvoiced
versions in the middle of words, and then became full-fledged phonemes
as they were needed for pronouncing Chinese words?

Yes, that is essentially correct. One idea (I first encountered it in a
paper by Jim Unger and Bob Ramsey in _Papers in Japanese Linguistics_
edited by Matt Shibatani back in the '70s when all three of them were
still graduate students) is that all surviving pure Japanese voiced
consonants started out as prenasalized unvoiced ones. Japanese not being
one of those (rather rare, I think) languages that allow nasal+obstruent
initial clusters, that precluded initial voiced obstruents.

One imagines that the ordinary man-in-the-michi must have had a bit of a
struggle with weird new Chinese vocabulary like "go" = "5" and "jipu" =
"10" when it first started flooding in.

Bart
.

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