149341831 the Phonology of Japanese

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The Phonology of JapaneseLaurence Labrune

Print publication date: 2012Print ISBN-13: 9780199545834Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May-12DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199545834.001.0001

Title Pages

The Phonology of JapaneseThe Phonology of the WorldsLanguagesThe Phonology of Japanese

General Editor: Jacques Durand

Published

The Phonology of Icelandic and Faroese

Kristjn rnason

The Phonology of Danish

Hans Basbll

The Phonology of Dutch

Geert Booij

The Phonology of Standard Chinese, second edition

San Duanmu

The Phonology of Polish

Edmund Gussmann

The Phonology of English

Michael Hammond


The Phonology of Italian

Martin Krmer

The Phonology of Norwegian

Gjert Kristoffersen

The Phonology of Japanese

Laurence Labrune

The Phonology of Portuguese

Maria Helena Mateus and Ernesto dAndrade

The Phonology and Morphology of Kimatuumbi

David Odden

The Lexical Phonology of Slovak

Jerzy Rubach

The Phonology of Hungarian

Pter Siptr and Mikls Trkenczy

The Phonology of Mongolian

Jan-Olof Svantesson, Anna Tsendina, Anastasia Karlsson, and VivanFranzn

The Phonology of Armenian

Bert Vaux

The Phonology and Morphology of Arabic

Janet Watson

The Phonology of Catalan

Max Wheeler


The Phonology of German

Richard Wiese

In preparation

The Phonology of Tamil

Prathima Christdas

The Phonology of Welsh

S. J. Hannahs

The Phonology of Turkish

Bari Kabak

The Phonology of Latin

Giovanna Marotta

The Phonology of Spanish

Iggy Roca

The Phonology of Greek

Anthi Revithiadou

The Phonology of Swedish

Tomas Riad

The Phonology of Washo

Alan C. L. Yu

(p. iv )


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Acknowledgements

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199545834.002.0005

This work is a substantially revised and updated version of my book inFrench entitled La phonologie du japonais, jointly published by the ParisLinguistic Society and Peeters editions in 2006.

For his constant support and enthusiasm, I would like to express mygratitude to Jacques Durand, who supervised this work from its verybeginnings and later gave me the opportunity to publish it at OxfordUniversity Press.

Many thanks are also due to the following friends and colleagues for theircomments and help on earlier versions in French or in English of this bookor on parts of it: the late Nick Clements, Marc Plnat, Takayama Tomoaki,Catherine Garnier, Franois Dell, Tanaka Shinichi, Irne Tamba, Elsa Gomez-Imbert, Martin Kramer and several anonymous readers.

I am especially indebted to Kamiyama Takeki who read the entire finalmanuscript with great care, making many valuable comments andsuggestions which helped me correct a number of mistakes.

Particular mention must also be made of Abe Junko, Hiraide Naoya, WakasaAnju, Furihata Atsuko, Nakamura Yayoi, Kawaguchi Yuji, and many otherfriends and colleagues who kindly provided information on the Japaneseexamples, of Joan Busquets for his help in editing the figures, and of MichelVieillard-Baron for assistance with the poetic materials.

I am also most grateful to all the Japanese scholars who have provided mewith their teaching, advice, support, and help throughout the last twenty

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years or so during my research stays in Japan, in particular Komatsu Hideo,Kitahara Yasuo, Hayashi Chikafumi, Haraguchi Shsuke, Jo Hakutar, KondTakako, Aoki Sabur, and I am especially grateful to Takayama Tomoaki whowas always willing to share his vast knowledge of the phonology of Modernand Ancient Japanese with me. I owe a special and old debt to AkinagaKazue thanks to whom I discovered the joy of Japanese phonology at WasedaUniversity during the years 19871989.

I acknowledge with gratitude several scholarships from the Japanese Ministryof Education and The Japan Foundation, which allowed me to conductresearch in Japan at Waseda University and Tsukuba University on severaloccasions. These institutions gave me the precious opportunity to carry outmost of the preliminary investigation for this work. My research has alsobenefited from the constant scientific and financial support of my CNRSresearch team in Bordeaux and in Toulouse, CLLE ERSS (UMR 5263) and theUniversity of Bordeaux 3 which I also want to thank.

(p. vi ) I also thank Teddy Auly, a cartographer at the Centre National de laRecherche Scientifique and the University of Bordeaux 3, who edited the twomaps included in this book.

Finally, my sincere thanks go to John Davey and his staff at Oxford UniversityPress for their editorial support and everlasting patience.

None of these persons, of course, necessarily agrees with the analyses Ipropose. All errors and omissions are mine.

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Tables, Figures, and Maps

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199545834.002.0007

Table 1.1. Hiragana (basic symbols) 8Table 1.2. Katakana (basic symbols) 9Table 3.1. Consonantal phonemes of Japanese 59Table 4.1. Summary of blocking patterns among Yamato nounnouncompounds 123Table 6.1. The 103 distinctive moras of Modern Standard Japanesein phonological transcription 144Table 7.1. Location of accent in nominal Yamato and Sino-Japanesewords (according to Sibata, 1994), in relation to length of lexemes187Table 7.2. Accent of simplex Yamato nouns 194Table 7.3. Accentual effect of particles 195Table 7.4. Accent of verbs 198Table 7.5. Accent of -i adjectives 199Table 7.6. Accent of compounds made up of a numeral + Sino-Japanese specifier 246Table 7.7. Cross-dialectal accent correspondences for bimoraicnouns for the five Kindaichi word classes 256Figure 2.1. Spectrogram and oscillogram of aki kara (with devoicedi) 35Figure 2.2. Spectrogram and oscillogram of aki demo (no devoicingof i) 36Figure 2.3. Final vowel shortening in Western clippings 48Figure 2.4. Token frequency of vowels in Archaic Japanese 57Figure 2.5. Token frequency of vowels in Modern Japanese 57

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Figure 3.1. Textual frequency (in %) of Archaic Japanese consonants99Figure 3.2. Lexical frequency (in %) of Archaic Yamato Japaneseconsonants for the initial of words 100Figure 3.3. Lexical frequency in absolute value of consonantsaccording to their position in bimoraic Yamato nouns in the modernlanguage 100Figure 3.4. Textual frequency of modern Japanese consonants 101Figure 7.1. Accent curve (F0) of hana-ga flower 182Figure 7.2. Accent curve (F0) of hana-ga nose 182Map 1. Administrative Japan xivMap 2. Geographical distribution of accent types 252

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Notes on Transcription, Abbreviations, and Other Matters

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199545834.002.0008

The system of romanization adopted throughout the book is the Hepburnsystem (####, hebon-shiki), except for the notation of the bilabial fricative[F] which is written as h before u, and of vowel length. Long vowels aretranscribed as ou, aa, ii, ei, or ee,uu (rather than ,,, , ), except in propernames, linguistic terms, and in the bibliography. This transcription, which hasbeen calqued on the kana writing, has the advantage of allowing for a moreadequate notation of accent by dissociating the two parts of a long vowel. Ithas one drawback, which is that it does not allow for a distinction betweentou # tower (actually pronounced as [to]) and tou ## to ask ([to])which are both spelled as ## in hiragana. IPA transcription will be providedfor disambiguation of ou sequences in the text when necessary.

When needed, the phonological transcription (see Table 6.1, section 6.1)is used, as well as phonetic transcriptions in the International PhoneticAlphabet (IPA). For instance, the word ####(## in kanji) meaning repairwill be transcribed as shuuri in adapted Hepburn, /syuRri/ in phonologicaltranscription, and [i] in IPA.

In Hepburn romanizations, the accented mora appears in bold. In IPAtranscriptions, the sign is placed before the accented mora following theusual practice in the IPA: kokoro [kokoo] heart, kyouto [kjoto] Kyto.Atonic words are followed by the symbol : sakura cherry tree. ManyJapanese words display several possible accent patterns. Generally, onlythe most frequent pattern is given for a word, except when accent variationmay be relevant to the discussion. Accent will not be provided for ancient,dialectal, or invented forms (except when relevant for the discussion),for non-independent morphemes and in cases where the form has to be


considered independently of its accentuation. In the citation of examplestaken from other scholars who do not provide accent information, I haveautomatically added the accent patterns if necessary.

The source word of Western loans is given between braces: konpyuutaacomputer {computer}.

The components in transparent compound words are separated by a hyphen:kodomo-beya children's room when relevant to the discussion.

The following abbreviations are used:

(p. xiii ) intr.= intransitive verb

tr.= transitive

= any mora

m= deficient (weak) mora

M= regular mora

= syllable

= foot

V= vowel

C= consonant

C1= initial constituent, C2 = final constituent (in compounds)

#= word boundary

*= unattested form (or, reconstructed forms in passages dealing withhistorical matters)

jp= Japanese

ch= Chinese

rk= Rykyan

H= high (tone), or heavy syllable


L= low (tone), or light syllable

AJ= Archaic Japanese

OJ= Old Japanese.

In Chapter 3, which is devoted to the consonantal system, the notation ofclassical (linear) generative phonology is used. For instance, the formula x y /_ z reads as x becomes y when occurring before z.

Old Chinese reconstructions come from Td (1996) except when otherwisespecified.

Japanese personal names are given in the following order: family name,personal name. They are cited under the romanized form which appears inthe original publication. Authors names of books and papers published inJapanese have been transcribed following the Hepburn system, except forthose people who have chosen some other transcription (when this othertranscription is known to me).

The spectrograms and the oscillograms were made using the Praat softwaredeveloped by Paul Boersma and David Weenink, Amsterdam.

Finally, note that contrary to a majority of recent Western works on Japanesephonology, I do not recognize the existence of the syllable in this language,although I will occasionally provide syllabic information or representations forcomparative purposes when needed. The view retained in this book is that ofthe native Japanese tradition in phonology, which holds that only the mora isrelevant. (p. xiv )


Map 1. Administrative Japan

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Introduction

Laurence Labrune

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199545834.003.0001

Abstract and Keywords

This first chapter provides a general introduction to the book, presenting itsaims, methods, theoretical background, the status, origins, and periodisationof the Japanese language, as well as the previous scholarship written on thesubject of Japanese phonology. It also presents the writing system of modernJapanese, made of a mixture of Chinese characters, two kana syllabaries andLatin alphabet, and describes and discusses the issue of the lexicon partitioninto Yamato, Sino-Japanese and Western words.

Keywords: Japanese language, periodisation, Japanese writing system, Chinese characters,two kana syllabaries, Latin, Yamato words, Sino-Japanese words, Western words

The Phonology of Japanese offers a comprehensive overview of thephonological structure of modern Japanese from its segmental to its prosodicand accentual structure. The purpose of the book is twofold.

First, it will present the actual state of the art of Japanese phonology,based on a compilation of recent and older Western and Japanese materials,reflecting current debates in Japanese phonology. The aim is to providea synthesis of two major research streams: that of Japanese traditionallinguistics and philology, kokugogaku ###, which is characterized by itsdata-oriented approach, a strong philological background, and carefulattention to the empirical realities of the language, but which, unfortunately,seems to be largely ignored outside Japan in spite of its excellence andremarkable achievements (see the seminal works by Kindaichi Haruhiko,Hashimoto Shinkichi, Hattori Shir, Hamada Atsushi, Kamei Takashi, and


many others); that of Western scholarship, for which Japanese has oftenserved as a test ground for newly developing theories. One should recallthat many aspects of Japanese phonology have contributed to the advanceof modern phonological theory in a significant manner. Without aiming atexhaustivity, let us mention the works of James McCawley in the 1960s(classical generative phonology), Haraguchi Shsuke in the 1970s (non-linear phonology), It Junko and Armin Mester in the 1980s and 1990s(underspecification theory, Optimality Theory), and Kubozono Haruo in the1990s and 2000s (Optimality Theory).

In sum, the main ambition of this book is to survey the achievements byscholars belonging to different linguistic schools and traditions, to assessthem critically, and to integrate them into a uniform approach in order tomake the results available to a larger scientific community. It is hard tosimply grasp the quantity and quality of native research when one hasno access to it, and it is even harder to evaluate it, be it in the field ofphonology or of any other area of linguistics. It should also be acknowledgedthat some recent Western works often fail to give credit to the richness andexcellence of this tradition.1 This is (p. 2 ) why it has appeared essential todevote so much attention to Japanese contributions through an approachthat attempts to blend and reconcile, in a unifying perspective, two waysof doing linguistics that usually ignore each other. This stand by no meansprecludes our casting a critical eye over one or other approach.

Further, this book aims to offer new analyses and data concerning someof the central issues of Japanese phonology in a theoretically orientedapproach. Issues for which new analyses are proposed in this volume arethose of the mora and syllable, the notion of special mora, compoundnoun accentuation, default accentuation (through a case study of Westernborrowings), the underlying accent of some Sino-Japanese morphemes, thestatus of diphthongs, the consonant /r/, and the interaction of moras andfeet.

The aim is thus to provide both a critical synthesis of the state of the artin Japanese phonology and to provide theoretically oriented descriptionand analyses in its main areas. However, the purpose is not to promotea given theoretical or formal framework set in advance and to which thedata of Japanese would be forcefully moulded. Rather, what I have tried todo is to provide generalalbeit preciseinformation on the phonologicalstructure of the Japanese language in all its complexity and, whenever itappears relevant, to point to the analytical and theoretical extensions of the


issue likely to be considered. Therefore it is why priority is always given tothe presentation of the linguistic data. I have nevertheless chosen to givea tighter theoretical and formal treatment to a small number of specificissues that have appeared to deserve more thorough treatment due to theirimportance in the field.

There are unfortunately a number of issues that I could not address as Iwould have liked to. Notably, there is no in-depth treatment of intonation.The morpho-phonology of verbal flexion would also probably have meriteda whole chapter. However, this aspect of Japanese morpho-phonologybeing generally introduced in Japanese grammars and even textbooks, it isrelatively easy to find good descriptions of it outside specialized phonologyor morphology works.

This book is intended for a general audience of students and linguists withno specialized knowledge of the Japanese language, and to non-linguistJapanologists who want to obtain up-to-date information in the field ofJapanese phonology.

For the needs of the latter audience, Japanese terminology has beenprovided both in roman transcription and in the original writing (kana orkanji), and priority has been given to first-hand sources and references in theJapanese language.

(p. 3 ) 1.1 Theoretical Background

The general framework of our reflection and analyses will be that ofgenerative phonology in the broad sense as it has been developed from theend of the 1960s onwards, although some parts of the book also owe a greatdeal to structural phonology, a current that was widely followed in Japanin the 1940s, 1950s, and even later, in the works of outstanding Japaneselinguists like Hattori Shir and Kindaichi Haruhiko, whose analyses will beoften referred to in the following pages. But whatever framework lies behindour discussions, a distinction is always made between an underlying form (orinput) and a surface form (output). In order to account for the formal relationwhich exists between these two levels, we adopt a non-derivational approachwhich is that of Optimality Theory (see Prince and Smolensky, 1993, Kager,1999, for introductions), in which the relationship between the input and theoutput is viewed as the result of the interaction of constraints rather thansequential rule application as in the traditional generative model (Chomskyand Halle, 1968). Such an approach proves to be particularly effective forthe treatment of phenomena relating to prosodic morpho-phonology, and it


will be used, in particular, for the formal analysis of default accentuation andcompound nouns accentuation which will be offered in Chapter 7.

As regards contents representations, be it the internal structure ofsegments in terms of distinctive features or the architecture of the prosodiccomponents, the references are clearly those of traditional non-linear andautosegmental phonology. Optimality Theory has actually very little to sayabout the contents and nature of representations, and is compatible withvarious representational conceptions.

Phonology being a relatively technical and formal discipline, it was notpossible within the limits of this work to provide definitions and explanationsof all the concepts used here. It is assumed that the basic notions ofarticulatory phonetics and of phonological analysis are known. Readers whowant to acquaint themselves with the discipline are invited to consult forexample the reference works of Kenstowicz (1994a), Goldsmith (1990, 1995),and Hayes (2009), which provide good introductions to various aspects ofphonological theory.

In the pages devoted to the presentation of segmental phonology (Chapters2, 3, and 4), the theoretical background of the description and analyses willbe cast in a classical (and rather neutral) framework in terms of features andstatements. A broadly generativist phonological framework will be adopted,such as the one introduced in Kenstowicz (1994a). For the mora and syllableanalysis (Chapter 6), the autosegmental, non-linear framework will be used.I will refer especially to the conceptions developed by Larry Hyman (2003[1985]) regarding (p. 4 ) the status of the TBU (tone-bearing units), i.e. themoras, for the analysis, but other standard models will also be reviewed forthe sake of comparison.

The accentual analyses of compound nouns and of Western borrowingsin Chapter 7 (sections 7.2.5 and 7.3.2) are cast within the frameworkof Optimality Theory. Some other current phonological frameworks willoccasionally be referred to when necessary, for instance when previousscholarship and analyses concerning some of the problems of Japanesephonology provide alternative and arguably more insightful views of thephenomena under consideration.

1.2 The Japanese Language

Japanese is spoken by about 130 million speakers, nearly all living inthe Japanese archipelago. Its genetic affiliation is dubious. It has often


been classified as a Ural-Altaic language, but the reality of its origins ismore complex. Prehistoric Japanese is probably the result of hybridizationbetween an Austronesian and an Altaic language, with some possible othercontinental influences.

The language closest to Japanese is Rykyan, spoken in the Ryky Islands,southwest of Kysh. Together, they form the Japonic family.

The language closest to Japanese outside Rykyan is Korean. Thereexist strong typological resemblances between the two languages, whichsuggest a genetic relationship, although well-established regular phoneticcorrespondences are hard to establish (see Martin, 1966 for an attempt).

Two main Japanese dialect groups are recognized: Eastern dialects (Tkytype) and Western dialects (Kyto-saka type), and Japan is still a countrywith great dialectal diversity.

This book is primarily concerned with Modern and Contemporary StandardJapanese. Japanese linguists generally refer to that variety as hyjungo (###) standard language, kytsgo (###) common language, or Tkygo (###) the Tky dialect. It corresponds roughly to the language spoken in thedistricts of the area known as Yamanote in Tky and in the national media,in particular the NHK (Japanese Broadcasting Corporation).

We will also refer to dialectal varieties of the language and to historicaldevelopments when necessary for an understanding of the synchronic facts.

For the periodization of Japanese, the following labels are adopted. Thesedivisions also correspond to standard major political divisions in Japanesepolitical history:

Archaic Japanese (jdaigo###): before 794 (until the end of theNara period)

Old Japanese (chkogo ###): 7941350 (Heian and Kamakura) (p. 5 ) Middle Japanese (chseigo ###): 13501603 (Muromachi,

Azuchi-Momoyama) Pre-modern Japanese (kinseigo ###): 16031868 (Edo) Modern Japanese (kindaigo ###): 18681945 (from Meiji to

World War II)

Archaic Japanese was the period when Chinese characters were firstmassively imported into Japan. The materials of those times are writtenexclusively using Chinese characters, read in a Chinese or a Japanese


manner (Manygana, #### Chinese characters used only for theirphonetic value, see below).

Old Japanese saw the development of the kana syllabaries, and theflourishing of a national literature written exclusively in kana with very fewwords of Chinese origin. The language reflected in the materials is primarilythat of the Kyto aristocracy and has served as the basis for the prestigewritten language for centuries.

The middle of the fourteenth century can be seen as the major turning pointbetween Ancient and Modern Japanese, to the extent that it is sometimessufficient to oppose Old Japanese (the language before the fifteenth century)to Modern Japanese (the language after the fifteenth century). MiddleJapanese underwent significant changes due to the spread of the Sino-Japanese vocabulary and the generalized use of the kanji to write it. Theso-called kanji-kana majiri bun (######## kanji and kana mix style),based on a mixture of kanji and kana as in Modern Japanese (see section 1.5)became the most common style of writing. Middle Japanese is also a periodof major modification in the verbal and adjectival flexional system as well asin the phonological system with the establishment of the special segments(see Chapter 5), as a result of the sound changes known as onbin ##, whosefirst occurrences can be traced back to Old Japanese.

Pre-modern Japanese, in the Edo period, is known to us through a hugenumber of different types of materials reflecting the colloquial and dialectaldiversity of the time, including a number of foreign descriptions of theJapanese language, principally European ones, with the publication ofdictionaries and grammar books, but also accounts made by Chinese andKorean scholars (such foreign descriptions of Japanese actually started in thefifteenth century). Modern Japanese, starting with the Meiji Restauration in1868, has been influenced by Western languages. It also corresponds to thespread of Tky Japanese as the standard language, and the development ofa new form of written language closer to the spoken one.

Contemporary Japanese (gendaigo ###) can be used more specifically torefer to the variety of language which developed after World War II.

(p. 6 ) 1.3 Particular Status of Japanese for Linguistic Science

A word should be said here about the status of Japanese in the field oflinguistics. Japanese is no doubt one of the best-documented non-Indo-European languages in the world, if not the best-documented. In addition, it


has a rare characteristic: most specialists of Japanese linguistics are nativespeakers of the language, who, moreover, have been working within theirown rich linguistic tradition in a cumulative manner, without ignoring theachievements of general linguistics outside their country. This tradition,it should be emphasized, did not develop in an intellectual environmentcompletely sealed off from the rest of the world. It has been nourished byChinese, Indian, European, and American contributions throughout its longhistory. Descriptive and cumulative work has thus been conducted in anoptimal manner, although one might have the feeling that, in very recentyears, even the major works by outstanding scholars such as Arisaka Hideyo,Hashimoto Shinkichi, Kindaichi Haruhiko, and Hattori Shir, for example,are no longer part of the compulsory reading of younger Japanese linguiststrained in the West.

Last but not least, Japanese linguistic research has enjoyed quite afavourable economic environment. For decades, the various academicinstitutions of the country such as research centres and universities havedevoted an impressive number of material means to research on thenational language and its dialects, with the result that one can benefit,in the case of Japanese, from an exceptional quantity of quality data anddocumentation (even more, it seems, than for English or French, whichhave also been extensively studied). The accumulation of descriptive andanalytical materials is completely bewildering, and contemporary phonologywould be much worse off if it did not take account of the contributions of theJapanese academic tradition.

1.4 Previous Western Literature On the Phonology ofJapanese

There exist few general references in European languages relating tothe phonology of Japanese, in comparison to the huge number of studiescarried out in Japan. I will only mention here studies of a general andbroad character, but naturally there are a fair number of articles and somemonographs relating to specific aspects of the phonology of Japanese(mainly in English).

The excellent book by Timothy J. Vance, An Introduction to JapanesePhonology, published in 1987, constitutes the best descriptive reference ofthe (p. 7 ) discipline in the English language. Unfortunately, it has been outof print for a number of years, and therefore hard to get. Timothy Vance isalso the author of The Sounds of Japanese, published in 2008, which is a


handbook designed for English-speaking students. It is of course impossiblenot to mention James McCawleys thesis, The Phonological Component of aGrammar of Japanese, published in 1968, which was one of the first studiesseeking to apply to a language other than English the generativist frameworkof the Sound Pattern of English (Chomsky and Halle, 1968). This referenceremains invaluable, and much of the data and analyses of McCawley havenot lost their interest, but a lot of water has gone under the bridge ofphonological theory since 1968, so the framework is a bit outdated. Oneshould also mention the monograph by Samuel E. Martin, Morphophonemicsof Standard Colloquial Japanese, published in 1952, that of Gnther Wenck,The Phonemics of JapaneseQuestions and Attempts (1966) as well asJapanese Phonetics (1997) and Japanese Phonology (2000) by AkamatsuTsutomu. Wenck is also the author of a monumental Japanische Phonetikin four volumes, written in German (19541959). In French, one shouldmention Haruhiko Kinda-ichi (= Kindaichi) and Hubert Mass, Phonologie dujaponais standard, published in 1978, which consists in fact of a translationand adaptation by the second author of an original Japanese text by thefirst author (Kindaichi), one of the most eminent Japanese phonologists.In addition to the fact that it is out of print, this work, which is rather short(59 pages), is theoretically outdated. I am the author of La phonologie dujaponais, published in 2006 by the Socit de Linguistique de Paris (Peeters,Leuven). The present book is a substantially updated and modified versionof this 2006 French edition. All these books, except for Labrune (2006) andVance (2008), have sadly been out of print for a number of years.

1.5 Overview of the Writing System

Throughout this book, we will occasionally refer to the orthographical statuswhich some of the phonological units of the language have received in thenative writing system of Japanese. This is because the written dimensionprovides an interesting background to the phonological reality of these units.The graphemic system often reflects the phonemic one, and, vice versa,since phonology in turn can be influenced by the writing system, or, to putit in Suzukis words (Suzuki, 1977), writing can become a formative agentof the language. This is especially true for Japanese. Kess and Miyamoto(1999:32) observe that the nature of the multi-faceted Japanese orthographymust be viewed as a formative agent that exerts some influence, if notpower, over the spoken language itself. However, it goes without sayingthat the orthographical criteria should not be held up as definite proof of thephonological status of a given element.


(p. 8 ) This being said, a general presentation of the writing system ofJapanese will be given in the following pages, but readers with no specificinterest in the issue may skip this section and proceed directly to thefollowing one.

The Japanese writing system is composed of four different scripts. First, it hastwo original syllabaries2 of 48 signs each (of which 46 only are presently incommon use), the hiragana ### and the katakana ###, which are referredto under the generic term of kana ##. Katakana and hiragana were createdby the Japanese. They both took as their basis Chinese characters usedonly for their phonetic value (the manygana ####; see Seeley, 1991for a general presentation of the history and development of the Japanesewriting system in English). Hiragana and katakana are based on the mora3and take as their basis the same units, so that a given mora of Japanesecan be denoted by the corresponding letter of either set. The elaboration ofthese two sets of kana symbols was more or less achieved around the tenthcentury.

In addition, several thousands of ideographic characters originally borrowedfrom Chinese, the kanji ##, are used. The Latin alphabet, rma-ji ####, andArabic numerals are also part of the modern writing system. The writing of aJapanese text is done today by using in a joint and complementary way thefirstTable 1.1. Hiragana (basic symbols)

a # i # u # e # o #

ka # ki # ku # ke # ko #

sa # shi # su # se # so #

ta # chi # tsu # te # to #

na # ni # nu # ne # no #

ha # hi # hu # he # ho #

ma # mi # mu # me # mo #

ya # yu # yo #

ra # ri # ru # re # ro #

wa # wi # we # wo #

N #(p. 9 )


Table 1.2. Katakana (basic symbols)

a # i # u # e # o #

ka # ki # ku # ke # ko #

sa # shi # su # se # so #

ta # chi # tsu # te # to #

na # ni # nu # ne # no #

ha # hi # hu # he # ho #

ma # mi # mu # me # mo #

ya # yu # yo #

ra # ri # ru # re # ro #

wa # wi # we # wo #

N #three systems (hiragana,katakana, and kanji), and, in an accessory manner,the latter two.

The writing of Japanese is unanimously recognized as one of the mostcomplex, or even the most complex, of all known systems. As Kess andMiyamoto (1999:13) put it, it is no stretch of the imagination to declareJapanese one of the most intricate, most elegant and yet most difficultwriting systems in the modern world. Complexity lies first of all in the factthat the structure and the orthographical principles of these various scriptsare fundamentally different. Kana and the Latin alphabet have in commonthe fact that they are phonographic. However, the kana adopt as a basic unitthe mora, while the alphabet is based on the phoneme. Chinese characters,on the other hand, are primarily logographic (ideographic) symbols, like theArabic numerals. Moreover, the way Chinese characters are used in Japanesewriting is the source of another complexity, since, as we shall see below,most characters can be read in at least two fashions, depending mostly onthe context in which they occur.

Tables 1.1 and 1.2 present the hiragana and katakana according to thetraditional order of the gojonzu (#### table of the fifty sounds4). As weshall see in more detail in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, the core phonemic system ofJapanese consists of five vowels (a, i, u, e, o) and fourteen consonants (p, b,t, d, k, g, s, z, h, m, n, r, y, w). It will be noted that the combinations startingwith p,b,d,z,g, which are derived from the corresponding unvoiced kana


letter by (p. 10 ) addition of a diacritic symbol, as well as those comprisinga palatalization, do not appear here (we will reconsider this point a littlefurther; a table of all the Japanese moras is provided in Chapter 6, Table 6.1).

Hiragana mainly denote grammatical elements or elements with no stablereferents such as enclitic particles, verbal and adjectival inflexions, functionalnames, interjections, connectors, and a number of adverbs. They aresometimes used to write lexical morphemes that the scripter does not want(or does not know how) to write in characters. Texts for children are thustranscribed exclusively in hiragana, which are the first writing symbolstaught to Japanese children.

Katakana are generally reserved for the transcription of recent foreign loans.They are also sometimes used to write mimetic words, the names of plantsor animals, dialectal or slang forms, and sometimes also erudite words. Theymay also be employed to highlight an element in a sentence, somewhat likethe italics in the Latin alphabet script, to mark irony, or even to give a morecolloquial, oral flavour to a text.

The modern versions of hiragana and katakana (Tables 1.1 and 1.2) comprise46 or 48 signs if one takes into account the two kana denoting the moraswi and we that are in principle encountered only in texts written prior to1946. The characteristic of the hiragana and the katakana is initially, as theterm syllabary reflects, that they transcribe syllables with the traditionalJapanese direction of the term, that is, moras. A second characteristic isthat they use diacritics rather than distinct letters to denote the differencebetween voiceless and voiced obstruents. Another 58 additional morascan thus be written by the addition of a diacritic symbol, or combinationof two existing kana. Voiced obstruents are marked by two small strokes,the dakuten ## or nigoriten ###, placed at the upper right corner of thematrix of a given kana (1a, see also sections 3.7.1 on the correspondencebetween h and b, and Chapter 4 on voicing in general). A comparable deviceis used to represent the moras pa,pi, pu, pe, and po: a small circle, thehandakuten ### (literally semi-voicing dot, 1b) is added at the top of thekana transcribing the h series.

(1)a. Notation of obstruent voicing

t :d

tachitsu

###

:dajizu

###


teto

##

dedo

##

s :z

sashisuseso

#####

:zajizuzezo

#####

k :g

kakikukeko

#####

:gagigugego

#####

h :b

hahihuheho

#####

:babibubebo

#####

b. Notation of moras starting with /p/h :p

hahihuheho#####

:papipupepo

#####

The palatalized combinations (kya,kyu, and so on) are transcribed by addingonto the right side of a kana containing the -i vowel the kana ya,yu, and yoin (p. 11 ) reduced size, as shown below (in the following examples, capitalsare used to reflect full-size kana, while small letters transcribe reduced-sizekana):

(2)


KI :KIya(kya)

SHI :SHIyu(shu)

CHI :CHIyo(cho)

# :##

# :##

# :##

Hiragana and katakana are indeed different scripts but they are almostidentical as far as the principles that underlie their internal structure,organization, and phonemic referential units are concerned. The onlydifference between the two is a tiny one. It lies in the fact that vocaliclength is not treated identically. In katakana, it is uniformly representedby an horizontal line (vertical in cases where the text is written from topto bottom), while in hiragana, it is transcribed differently according to thequality of the long vowel: the kana letter for u is added after the morascontaining -u and -o when the length results from the fall of a consonantfollowed by u (the most frequent case), the letter for a is added after a, thatfor i after -e and -i. For instance (here the hyphens mark mora boundaries):

(3)toukyou

Tky pronounced[tokjo]

writtenTO-U-KIyo-U

#####(##)

guuzen fortuity pronounced[zeN]

writtenGU-U-ZE-N

#### (##)

reisei calm pronounced[ese]

writtenRE-I-SE-I

#### (##)

There exist some particular uses, which one encounters, for instance, incases of native Japanese words where the lengthening of the long vowel [o]corresponds to the loss of a consonant originally followed by o: the vocaliclength is noted in that case by means of the letter o, as in the word ookii (#


ohokii) large. One can also mention words like oneesan older sister, whoselong vowel is written ee and not ei.

In katakana, vowel length is indicated by means of a horizontal or verticalbar following the vowel (according to the direction of the writing), whateverthe quality of the vowel concerned, for example super suupaa ####.

The reduced-size kana tsu (# in hiragana and # in katakana) is employedto write the first part of a non-nasal geminate consonant, whatever it maybe. Thus atta ### had is noted A-tsu-TA in hiragana, while katto ###cut {cut} is noted KA-tsu-TO in katakana.

Apart from rare exceptions, the kana spelling of Japanese words is simpleand straightforward.

The Chinese characters, or kanji (##), are generally used to write the non-variable part of lexical morphemes of Chinese or Japanese origin. The stemof a flexional word of Japanese origin such as a verb or an adjective is writtenby (p. 12 ) means of one or several Chinese characters, while the variablepart is transcribed in kana. Thus the kanji # represents the idea of readingbut it can be read in different ways. As shown in the examples in (4), # isemployed to represent the stable part of the various inflected forms of theverb to read in Japanese and it is read yo-, according to its native Japanesereading (kunyomi ### meaning-reading). The endings which undergovariation will be noted in hiragana. The same character # is also used incompound nouns such as dokusha ## reader, tokuhon ## readingbook, koudoku ## subscription, and many others, with the Sino-Japanesereading (onyomi ### sound-reading) doku or toku. (Accents are ignored inthe following examples.)

(4)yomu ## #.MU to

read

yonda ###

#.N.DA read(pasttense)

yomanai ####

#.MA.NA.I do(es)notread

dokusha ## reader


tokuhon ## readingbook

koudoku ## subscription

It is generally considered that the knowledge of approximately 2000characters is sufficient for the reading of current Japanese texts. However,this figure is extremely relative, and represents in fact a minimumthreshold.5

The difficulty raised by the Japanese sinograms comes from the fact that, onthe one hand, a character almost always has several readings (see below,section 1.6.2), and that on the other hand, a lexeme can almost always bewritten using different characters. For instance, # is read yo-,doku, or toku.But the verb yomu to read can be written ## or ##.

A written Japanese sentence is thus composed of an arrangement of kanjiand kana, and it is not, moreover, uncommon that a text contains somesequences in the Latin alphabet or Arabic numerals. Texts are written fromtop to bottom vertically, starting from the rightmost side of the page, orhorizontally, from left to right. One occasionally encounters horizontalinscriptions, generally made up of a couple of Chinese characters, writtenfrom right to left.

Each symbol (kana,kanji,rma-ji, or figure) is separated by a blank. Theredoes not exist any special demarcating device to separate words orsyntagms. It is thus only the alternation between Chinese characters,hiragana, (p. 13 ) katakana, rma-ji, and Arabic numerals, as well as the useof punctuation, that helps the segmentation of the various elements of thesentence.

1.6 The Stratification of the Lexicon

The lexicon of Japanese is stratified into morphemes belonging to differentclasses corresponding to distinct morpho-phonological, semantic, andpragmatic systems. This organization is fundamental for the descriptionand comprehension of Japanese as a whole. Lexicon stratification plays acentral role in the grammar because it entails major structural as well aspragmatic (register) differences. Words belonging to different classes mayundergo different rules or constraints. For instance, one of the best-known,and most often cited, examples is rendaku (sequential voicing), whichapplies differently according to the stratum (see Chapter 4).


Japanese linguistics traditionally distinguishes a minimum of three lexicalclasses:

Wago ##, or Yamato lexemes, the class of native words withinwhich one might possibly put the subclasses of the mimetic wordsand other expressive words such as childish, familiar, or slangvocabulary.

Kango ##, Sino-Japanese lexemes. They are loans from Chineseintroduced massively in Japan starting from the fourth century atleast. This class comprises many words of the erudite and abstractvocabulary, as well as concepts and objects borrowed from Chineseculture, but it also contains other more common, unmarked items.

Gairaigo ###, which are lexemes that have been recentlyborrowed from foreign languages, primarily Western languagesfrom the sixteenth century. They contain mainly technical, scientificterms or refer to modern objects and concepts with a Westernconnotation.

It is sometimes useful to distinguish a fourth stratum, that of mimetic words6:onomatopoeias (giseigo ###) and ideophones (gitaigo ###).

The overwhelming majority of mimetic words are etymologically of nativeorigin.7 For this reason, they belong to the Yamato class in the strict sense,even if (p. 14 ) they display a number of properties which may lead one tocategorize them in a specific subclass. In this book, when necessary, wewill make a distinction, within the Yamato class, between non-mimetic andnon-expressive words (the Yamato class stricto sensu), and mimetic andexpressive words (a distinct class for some authors).

To the Yamato, Sino-Japanese, and Western strata, the class of non-integrated foreign words (gaikokugo ###) is sometimes added. Theseare words whose degree of adaptation into the Japanese language is notas advanced as that of the gairaigo. They consist of direct quotes from aWestern language in the Latin alphabet. Some scholars also distinguishbetween formal Sino-Japanese and vulgarized Sino-Japanese (Takayama,2005).

It is also necessary not to forget the existence of a mix or hybrid class(konshugo ###), which comprises compounds made up of words ormorphemes belonging to different classes, for instance wago + kango asin nimotsu luggage, kango + wago as in juu-bako superposable mealbox, gairaigo + wago as in demoru to demonstrate (in the streets) (fromdemo,demonsutoreeshon {demonstration} + -ru, verbal suffix). Finally,


note that a certain number of lexemes of Sanskrit, Ainu, or other origins donot fall into any of these categories and have unclear status as to the lexicalclass they belong to.

This partition is largely determined by etymology, but it would be imprudentto adopt too narrow a vision and a simply historical approach to the problem.Often, the supposed etymology is more determining than the real one, andthe actual phonological profile of the word plays a more important role thanits origin (not to mention its semantic or pragmatic profiles). Actually, thedifferences between the lexical classes are extremely delicate to handle.First of all, it is difficult to establish with precision the origin of certainlexemes. Second, we know almost nothing about the history of the Japaneselanguage before the fifth century, and in particular we are ignorant of thetrue nature of the contacts between the spoken language in Japan and thespoken language(s) in the Korean peninsula or elsewhere. One should alsotake into account the fact that loans from foreign languages (especially fromChinese) have had a deep influence and have considerably modified themorpho-phonology of the Yamato lexemes. Moreover, it is not unusual thatthe linguistic intuitions of non-linguist speakers regarding which lexical classa given lexeme belongs to are in clear contradiction with the true etymology.For example shio salt or mugi wheat are actually very old loans fromChinese, but they are handled and behave like Yamato words. The sameapplies to kappa raincoat or kasutera pound cake, which are words ofPortuguese origin but treated as Yamato lexemes. Which is more important,the etymological data or speakers intuitions? As Takayama (2005) observes,in order to determine the lexical stratum to which a given word belongs, onehas to consider both word forms (phonotactic patterns) and connotation,that is, (p. 15 ) whether the word is culturally associated with a foreignbackground. I would add that the writing may constitute another strong clueto determining which stratum a word belongs to.

Lastly, it will be necessary to question the manner this partition is acquiredby Japanese children. It is not clear whether native speakers acquire thisintuition through education, especially the knowledge of Chinese charactersand of the difference between Sino-Japanese and Japanese readings ofthe characters, and acquisition of katakana and hiragana (remember thatkatakana are used primarily for the notation of Western loanwords, whilekanji and kana are used to transcribe Yamato and Sino-Japanese words),or if it is of a deeper, truly linguistic nature. Probably, both dimensionsare involved, and education only serves to reinforce and stabilize a robustdifference. How does the child manage to internalize the difference between


Yamato words, Sino-Japanese words, and Western words? Is this knowledgeof a metalinguistic nature, that is, acquired through education and literacy,and particularly thanks to the mastering of the writing system? Ota (2004)provides a good discussion of the issue of the learnability of lexicon partitionin Japanese, and points out the unrealistic scenario of phonological learningthat is implied by OT constraint-based models (It and Mester, 1995a, b; Itand Mester, 1999; It, Mester, and Padgett, 1999, for instance).

In spite of these problems, the partition of the lexicon plays a key role inthe grammar of the language. It is conveyed in the writing, and constitutesan important component of the metalinguistic knowledge of any Japanesespeaker. In principle, Yamato words are written in hiragana or kanji,kango inkanji, and gairaigo in katakana. However, a well-integrated gairaigo can bewritten in hiragana or even in kanji, and a yamatoized kango can end upbeing written only in hiragana.

According to the statistics provided by the Shinsen Kokugo Jiten dictionary(8th edition, 2002), wago represent 33.8% of the entries of the dictionary,kango 49.1%, gairaigo 8.8%, and hybrid words 8.4%. The words of Chineseorigin are thus the most numerous in the lexicon. In textual frequency(corpus of the written language drawn from the press) the proportions areroughly similar with respect to type frequency (KKK, 1964). On the otherhand, wago are most frequent in speech: 46.9% compared with 40% for thekango (Hayashi O., 1982). The proportion of wago goes up to 71.8% in tokenfrequency. This is evidently explained by the fact that words of the basiclexicon, and those that fulfil a grammatical function (auxiliaries, particles,etc.), which are frequently repeated, almost all belong to the Yamato class.Moreover, some studies have shown that the proportions between the stratacould vary according to the sex of the speakers. The survey by Tsuchiya(1965) reveals indeed that kango are employed more (p. 16 ) frequently bymale than by female speakers, at least at the time of the investigation.

It is frequently the case that the same referent can be referred to by a wago,a kango, or a gairaigo, for instance:

(5)Wago Kango Gairaigo

tegami##

/shokan##

/retaa###

letter,missive


meshi#

/gohan##

/raisu###

rice

odori##

/buyou##

/dansu###

dance

However, the three lexemes in each set have different connotations, andsometimes also semantic specializations. The kango are generally felt tobe more formal, more precise, and belonging to a higher register than thewago or the gairaigo. The gairaigo generally refer to Western realities. Forexample, dansu can only refer to a Western type of dance, contrary toodori and buyou, and raisu designates some rice presented or cookedin a Western way. But there are exceptions. For instance, the word kappunuudoru {cup noodle} (originally a trade mark) indicates an instantaneousnoodle dish cooked in an Asian manner. Here, the connotation brought in bythe use of gairaigo is modernity. The gairaigo also tend to refer to concrete,material entities, whereas kango are preferred for the abstract (Loveday,1996). In addition, gairaigo frequently appear as compound formatives. Forexample retaa is more often used in expressions such as rabu retaa {loveletter} or retaa peepaa {letter paper} than in isolation.

1.6.1 Wago

In its diachronic sense, the term Yamato refers to the original, nativeJapanese language with no elements of Chinese or from any other foreignorigin. The most operational definition of what a Yamato word is seems to beas follows: a Yamato morpheme is a morpheme which does not result from aloan posterior to the fifth century of our era.8

In the old language, the following properties were characteristic of Yamatowords:

structure of the basic prosodic unit = V or CV; prohibition of hiatus (onsetless vowels were allowed only word

initially);


absence of words starting with a voiced obstruent (/b/, /d/, /g/, /z/)or with /r/;

impossibility of having two voiced obstruents, or two /r/, withinthe same root;

(p. 17 ) scarcity of the /e/ vowel, in particular at the beginning ofwords longer than two moras;

existence of vowel harmony; simplex lexemes from two to three mora long.

Most of these characteristics remain today only as a residue. In modernJapanese, words of Yamato origin are characterized by the absence of /p/, the absence of /h/ in word internal position, the impossibility of findinggeminated voiced obstruents and geminated /r/, and by the constraineddistribution of voiceless consonants after the mora nasal /N/. One will alsonote the scarcity of palatalized consonants.

Whenever the same referent can be referred to either by a lexeme of Yamatoor Sino-Japanese origin, the connotations brought in by the Yamato wordare generally associated with the register of intimacy, the expression ofsensations and emotions. They are also considered more poetic than Sino-Japanese or Western words, and constitute the core lexicon of Japanesetraditional poetry (haiku,tanka).

1.6.2 Kango

Sino-Japanese words, or kango (##), are words which are written using oneor more Chinese characters pronounced in a Sino-Japanese manner. Kangoare words (go #), but they are above all meaningful written units associatedwith one or more Sino-Japanese readings. If the character correspondingto a word of Chinese origin is no longer used to write the word, it becomesdifficult to regard the word in question as a kango. One can mention the caseof the lexeme sei fault, reason, which, in spite of its Chinese origin, is neverwritten in characters (##) in contemporary Japanese, or the word sesse to,assiduously (##(Nakada and Hayashi, 1982). Consequently, most Japanesespeakers are surprised to learn that these words are actually kango.

Many kango are jukugo (##), that is, Sino-Japanese compound words madeup of two to four kanji. A majority of one-character (one kanji) Sino-Japaneselexemes only occur as bound morphs, that is, as components of a jukugo,and never occur in an autonomous way, like sho # write in tosho ## bookor shokan ## letter. However, a few one-character kango (ichiji kango ##


##) also function as autonomous words, like hon # book, niku # meat, orki # spirit.

In the modern language, kango lexemes are often characterized by thefollowing phonological properties:

presence of many palatalized consonants; presence of mora nasals; presence of geminations (only in compound kango); presence of long vowels; (p. 18 ) absence of non-geminated /p/; absence of geminated voiced obstruents; morpheme (stem) length from one to two moras.

Here are typical kango lexemes: gakkou ## school, nippon ## Japan,gyuuniku ## beef, shuukyou ## religion.

Sino-Japanese morphemes are organized around a vowel, possibly precededby a consonant, palatalized or not. This group may be followed by a moranasal (noted /N/), by a vocalic length (noted /R/), by a front high vowel /i/, orby an extra mora containing /t/ or /k/ followed by the vowels /i/ or /u/. Thisstructure can be synthesized with the following formula where the symbolsbetween the braces indicate non obligatory elements:

(6)Examples:

/hoN/ hon

/koR/ kou

/ai/ ai

/botu/ botsu, /kiti/ kichi, /kyaku/kyaku, /teki/ teki9

Thus one has: i # stomach, ya # house, ki # spirit, ryo # travel, un #fate, man # ten thousand, jun /zyuN/ # pure, sou /soR/ # grass, kyou /kyoR/ # to teach, nai # inside, botsu /botu/ # rejection, kyaku # guest,kichi /kiti/ # good fortune, reki # passing of time, and so on.

Loans from Chinese were made through three successive waves from theend of Antiquity, over a vast period covering nearly one thousand years, andstarting at least from the fourth century onwards. This is the reason why itis not uncommon for a given character to have two or even three different


Sino-Japanese readings (onyomi ###). According to Vance (1987:169),about 13% of the 1850 currently used kanji have more than one Sino-Japanese pronunciation. In addition, the majority of kanji also have at leastone native Japanese reading (kunyomi ###). The different types of Sino-Japanese readings are:

the go readings (or Wu readings, goon ##), which are linked tothe introduction of Buddhism in Japan and correspond to loansmade during the fifth and sixth centuries, probably via Korea. Theexact geographic source is not always clear, but it seems to havebeen somewhere in Southern China, near the mouth of the Yangtzeriver.

the kan readings (or Han readings, kanon ##), which are by farthe most important. They correspond to loans dating back to theseventh and eighth (p. 19 ) centuries. Kanon are derived from thepronunciation of the Tang capital Changan (presently Xian).

the t readings (or Tang readings, tin or ton ##, sometimesreferred to as son ## or tson ###). They concern laterborrowings, from different Chinese provinces, which explainswhy they are less homogeneous from the point of view of theirpronunciation.

To this list, one should add the so-called usage readings (kanyon ###),which correspond to alterations of kan or t readings, and which representirregular Sino-Japanese evolutions from the original Chinese pronunciations(see Vance, 1987:167ff. for a presentation in English, and Nakada andHayashi, 2000 in Japanese). One should also add a couple of loans datingback to a period earlier than the fifth century such as uma horse, e (# we)picture, or kinu silk, which have been perfectly adapted to the Yamatophonology, so that nothing in their phonological structure hints at the factthat they are indeed words of Chinese origin. Hence, they are often regardedas Yamato words.

So a given character is likely to possess several different Sino-Japanesereadings (onyomi ###). Some characters only have one Sino-Japanesereading, generally the kan reading, some have two, a kan and a go reading,and a small number of characters even have three, four, or even morereadings, since there may be several kan,go,t, and usage readings attachedto a single character. Most speakers are not capable of saying whethera given pronunciation is go,kan,t, or usage. It seems that they simplymemorize the different Sino-Japanese readings of a given character, and thecontexts in which each reading is employed. Here are some examples, which


illustrate some of the different cases one is likely to encounter, and whichprovide an idea of the complexity of the issue (Old Chinese reconstructionsare from Td, 1996):

(7)#

mirror#north

#clearness

#togo

#tenthousand

#various

#tosupply

Goreading

hoku myou# myau

gyou# gyau

mon nou# nahu

Kanreading

kan# kamu

hoku mei kou# kau

ban zou dou# dahu

Treading

an zou# zahu

na

Usagereading

man zatsu,zou

tou# tahu,nan

OldCh.

*klm *puk *m *h *mun *dzp *np

(p. 20 ) There are other alternations typical of Sino-Japanese lexemes, whichhave a more synchronic and morpho-phonemic status, such as the CV/Qalternation, the i/u alternation, the h/p alternation, and so forth. Those will beaddressed in the relevant chapters of this book.

The Sino-Japanese lexicon is rich in possibilities of lexical creation evenif, at the present time, those are not as exploited as they used to be. Thisis because, nowadays, gairaigo constitute another privileged source ofword-coining. Note also that a fair number of the kango currently in useare actually Japanese lexical creations (rather like neo-classical compoundswith Greek or Latin roots are in European languages). These are calledwasei kango #### Chinese words coined in Japan. This practice of lexicalcreation has been attested since the Heian period. These new lexemes aregenerally pure neologisms (for example denwa ## telephone), but theymay also represent the semantic calques of existing Yamato words. Forexample kaji ## fire is simply the Sino-Japanese reading of the Yamatoexpression hi no koto ###. During the Meiji era, literal translations ofwords belonging to Western languages by way of Chinese characters wereextremely common, like byouin ## hospital, a calquing from Dutch zieken-huis (illness + public house, cited by Loveday, 1996:71). These neologisms


containing Chinese characters have frequently made their way back toModern Chinese or Korean, where they have received the correspondingSino-Korean or Modern Chinese readings.

In comparison to Yamato and Western lexemes, kango are considered tobelong to a more formal and learned register. They correlate with intellect,distance, authority, formality, and are used in juridical, academic, orscientific texts, in preference to Yamato words when the alternative exists.

1.6.3 Gairaigo

What is a gairaigo? It is generally a word that has been borrowed in Japaneseafter the sixteenth century, and mainly during the twentieth century, froma language which does not use Chinese characters. For example tabako tobacco, cigarette (Portuguese {tabaco}), misa mass (Latin {missa}through Portuguese), zubon / zubon trousers (French {jupon}), meetoru metre (French {mtre}), biiru beer (Dutch {bier}), arubaito (student)job (German {Arbeit}), interi intellectual (Russian {intelligentsija}), bataabutter (English {butter}). It may also bealthough more rarelya wordborrowed recently from a modern Asian language using Chinese characterslike Chinese or Korean, but in Japanese the loan has kept a pronunciationwhich is close to that of the source language. That means that even if theword can be written in sinograms, those will not be read according to theconventional Sino-Japanese reading but with a pronunciation which attemptsto be faithful to that of the (p. 21 ) modern source language, for instancemaajan / maajan mahjong (from a Chinese dialect, this word was borrowedat the beginning of the twentieth century), chongaa old boy (Korean{chhonggak}), kochujan pepper paste (Korean {kochhujang}). Lastly, it isimportant to mention that some gairaigo are nothing more than lexical formscoined by the Japanese, and involving Western roots. They are made upeither by combining morphemes existing in one or more foreign languagesor by truncating a borrowed form. Japanese lexicographers call these waseieigo #### (English word created in Japan) or wasei ygo #### (Westernword created in Japan). They are usually written in katakana. Such wordsare extremely numerous, for example sarariiman {salaryman} a companyworker, gouruden-wiiku {golden week} a succession of several holidaysaround the end of April or beginning of May, woukuman {walkman}, naitaa{nighter} night game (baseball), paso-kon (abbreviation of {personalcomputer}) personal computer, depaato (abbreviation of {departmentstore}) department store.


It is also necessary to mention acronyms and Latin-alphabet-based creations,which also constitute a source of derivation and lexical coinage. The basisfor a number of acronyms are Yamato or Sino-Japanese morphemes, whoseinitial letter in the Latin alphabet is used for acronymization: Nippon HousouKyoukai ###### -# NHK / enu-ecchi-kee NHK (Japan BroadcastingCorporation), hentai ## -# H / etchi pervert, ofisu redii -# OL / ou erufemale employee.

The gairaigo often display phonotactic combinations that are not found inwago or kango (see section 3.14). They can also be very long, and containmany long vowels and geminate consonants.

Gairaigo are used primarily to refer to new objects, or to concepts borrowedfrom foreign cultures. They are particularly frequent in the fields of fashionand cosmetics, sport, non traditional arts, gastronomy, technology, andsciences. There often exists a native Japanese or Sino-Japanese equivalentof a gairaigo. The use of a gairaigo can also be dictated by pragmatic orstylistics factors. The connotations associated with this vocabulary are:the West, modernity, innovation, and also in certain cases refinement andsophistication.

It might be necessary to distinguish gairaigo, which are Japanized foreignloans, written in katakana, pronounced in a Japanese way, and likely tobe integrated in a Japanese sentence like any Yamato or Sino-Japaneselexeme, from gaikokugo ###, which are borrowed wholesale from a foreignlanguage. Gaikokugo are written in the alphabet and their pronunciationis not yet Japanized. Their lexical categorization also remains fuzzy. Suchnon-integrated loans are generally used in advertisements, without beingintegrated into a sentence. They are still at the margins of the language.

(p. 22 ) It follows from this definition that in Japanese, a gairaigo, literally aword coming from the outside, is not necessarily a foreign wordmanygairaigo are Japanese lexical creations, or Japenglishand that the majorgroup of lexemes of foreign origin, namely the kango, do not belong to thecategory of gairaigo.

1.6.4 Other Types

Japanese also contains a number of words of Sanskrit origin, most of whichpertain to the Buddhist vocabulary. These words were often borrowed viaChinese: for example kawara {kapla} tile, daruma {(bodhi-) dharma}, ordanna {dna} master, husband.


Words of Ainu origin, for example sake or shake {sakipe # sakuipe} salmon(literally summer food), kaba, kanba {kaniha} birch, rakko, rakko{rakko} sea otter, have dubious status. Certain lexicologists classify themamong Yamato words, others among the gairaigo. The difference generallycomes from the epoch at which the loan was made: the older it is, the morelikely the word will be regarded as a wago. It is necessary finally to mentiona number of prehistoric loans from Korean, such as kushi {kusil} a comb,a spit or tera {tSl} temple. These words are generally considered to beYamato words. From the morpho-phonological point of view, they do notdisplay any particular characteristic which distinguishes them from Yamatowords.

1.6.5 The Limits of Stratum Categorization

The formal boundaries between wago,kango, and gairaigo tend to attenuateas time goes by, through a process of lexicon homogenization. Thus thecharacteristics that were originally specific to kango, such as palatalization,the presence of the mora nasal /N/, gemination, the presence of the /r/consonant or of a voiced obstruent word-initially, ended up extending towords of the Yamato stratum. The presence of these elements thus nolonger constitutes, in itself, a proof that a word is of Chinese origin, even ifit remains generally possible to determine the origin of a lexeme just by itsphonological structure. On the other hand, most gairaigo, especially mostrecent ones, generally have a phonological structure which makes themimmediately identifiable as such. But the oldest gairaigo or the ones whichare in very frequent or daily use are more Japanized than those of morerecent introduction or those less frequently employed.

The classes are thus not discontinuous. They are organized rather like acontinuum: certain words belonging etymologically to one of the classescan move to another one, or borrow in a more or less occasional waysome of its morpho-phonological features. Certain words do not have thephonological, orthographical, or semantic profile of their true etymology,and they belong de facto to some other class than to the one that historyshould have confined them. (p. 23 ) For instance, kappa raincoat is anold loan from Portuguese, which is treated as a wago since it undergoesrendaku (sequential voicing) in the compound words ama-gappa raincoat orbiniiru-gappa rainwear made of plastic (Takayama T., 2005). Niku meat isoriginally a Sino-Japanese word, but it takes a Yamato polite prefix o-, insteadof go- normally used as the polite prefix of Sino-Japanese words. The readingyo / yon for the numeral # four is etymologically a Yamato word, but it


is chosen instead of the Sino-Japanese reading shi four in many numeralcompounds using Sino-Japanese components (for instance yo-nin rather than*shi-nin ## four persons), so that it behaves like a Sino-Japanese word.Finally, let us mention the word kouhii #### coffee, a Dutch loan {koffie},which is sometimes written in kanji (##) instead of katakana. The effectiveplacing of a lexeme in such or such a class can also vary according to thespeaker. Thus there do not exist absolute criteria to determine which classa lexeme belongs to. In many cases, whether an item belongs to a givenstratum or not cannot be determined on the basis of surface distributionpatterns (Ota, 2004). For instance, there is nothing in the surface phonologyof the Yamato word tonbo dragonfly which suggests that it does not belongto the same stratum as tenba flying horse, which is a Sino-Japanese word,or konbo combo, a Western borrowing. The script is often one of the crucialelements for native speakers, alongside the phonological characteristics ofthe word.

It and Mester (1995a, 1999) have proposed a concentric model, or coreperiphery organization of the lexicon, whose internal structuring is governedby the interaction of constraints. The lexicon is viewed as an abstract spacewith a core and a periphery. At the periphery stand the lexical items whichare least assimilated (gairaigo and gaikokugo), in the centre, the nativelexemes (Yamato). Sino-Japanese lexemes appear in intermediate position.In this model, the maximum set of lexical constraints holds in the core lexicaldomain, occupied by lexical items traditionally labelled as Yamato. It andMester (1995b) propose a slightly different implementation of this view. Theypostulate that all lexical items obey the same markedness constraints butthat there exist different versions of stratum-specific faithfulness constraints.The constraints which demands faithfulness for Yamato words are rankedlower than those demanding faithfulness for kango, which in turn are lowerthan those demanding faithfulness to gairaigo. So as the peripheral zoneof the lexicon is approached, many of the constraints cease to hold (areturn

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149341831 the Phonology of Japanese