Re: Japanese katakana phonetic patterns?

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 05:25:13 -0700 (PDT): "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx>: in sci.lang:

The only other German loanwords I can think of offhand are doitsu
(German) and arubaito (part-time job). The latter tends to confirm
that Japanese were hearing German rhotically in the period when the
borrowing was taking place.

In most German dialects, and also in standard pronounciation, the r in
Arbeit is not pronounced, or only weakly pronounced. The expected Japanese
version should be aabaito, in my opinon. I don't know why the r becomes ru
here. I don't know how these German loanwords came into the Japanese
language historically; maybe some hypercorrect spelling pronounciation was
involved?

Can you be certain that the words came from German and not Dutch? The
Dutch had the monopoly on Western contact with Japan for a couple of
centuries.

True. Arbeid is the Dutch word and only the last diphthong is slightly
different than in German (although details vary in both). Rhoticity
varies in both languages and also historically.

--
Ruud Harmsen, http://rudhar.com
.

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