Re: why is Japanese (spoken) nothing like Chinese?

Bart Mathias wrote: 
Geoff wrote:

[...]
I'm more interested in when the Chinese -ng endings became reduced to long vowels in Japanese. Middle Chinese 京都 kjang-to ---> Kyouto. As with 東京 Toukyou (dung-kjang), etc.


This came up for discussion is sci.lang.japan recently. I think all anyone can say for sure is that it happened by the time the regularization of borrowing into the forms that made it into dictionaries was first written, those that use "-i" or "-u" to make the originally final consonant pronounceable.

[...]

I should have noticed this is a two-part query. My response was directed at when Chinese -ng became Japanese -u or -i.

The change to long vowels (e.g., -eu --> -yo:, -ei --> -e:) may have been as much as half a millennium later.

Bart Mathias
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