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

Bart Mathias wrote:
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.

What stage of Japanese would that have been?

Japanese not being
one of those (rather rare, I think) languages that allow nasal+obstruent
initial clusters, that precluded initial voiced obstruents.

Hmm, Modern Greek comes to mind... while we're on the topic of initial
consonants, what is theory on the missing initial /r/s?

Also, one has to wonder, if /Np Nt Nk/ merged into /Nb Nd Ng/ in the
Sino-Japanese vocabulary, apparently attested to in Edo Japanese, how is
it that modern Japanese recovered those clusters? Also, what are the
conditions for the preservation of the /N/ in the cluster? For example,
why has 東 turned into ひがし instead of stopping at ひんがし?
.

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