Japanese is a weird language. In its modern form it is surprisingly regular and nice, but to compensate its historically attested linguistic history seems to be utterly filled with irregular sound laws. It's not always clear to me whether these sounds laws really are irregular, or whether the spelling of Japanese (and tendency towards historical spellings) just renders these developments extremely opaque. My sense is that the culture of Japanese historical linguistics seems less concerned with regular sound change than is typical from researchers in the indo-europeanist tradition. Whether that lack of concern is truly because it is concerningly irregular, or just not figured out well enough, I do not really know. But in this blogpost I'm going to attempt to present some thoughts on it that will hopefully make it look more regular...
Disclaimer: what I know about Middle Japanese is based entirely on textbook descriptions like Frellesvig's A History of the Japanese Language, and some searches on Wiktionary. Both are thoroughly in the camp of "not so bothered by irregular sound laws", so take all I say with a grain of salt, but perhaps it'll be resonating with someone, perhaps I'll be reinventing the wheel, and all this has been figured out but is just badly described in English literature (My Japanese is definitely not good enough to read Japanese historical linguistics in Japanese).
So my issue today is with the so-called onbin音便 "euphonic" sound changes. These are reductions of certain consonants with the vowel u/i. that happens at some point early in the Middle Japanese period. It seems that historical spellings continue to represent much more archaic phases of these words.
What is worth knowing his that what today in Japanese are voiced consonants, were originally pre-nasalized consonants. The onbin sound changes often come in two types vocalic and consonantal, and while to some extent vocalic versus consonantal seems to be a Western versus Eastern dialects distinction, Standard Japanese has a rather eclectic mix of both (presumably because Standard Japanese is based on the Eastern Tokyo dialect, but for centuries before that the Western Kyoto dialect was the central prestige dialect). For now I will assume that the irregularity in terms of consonantal versus vocalic outcomes is purely the result of dialect mixing.
The Onbin changes are as follows:
- pi > Vocalic u; Consonantal C (nipi-ta 'new field'> niuta > nyūta; > niCta > nitta)
- pu > Vocalic u; Consonantal C (taputwo- 'exalted' > tauto > tōto; > taCto > tatto)
- bi > Vocalic ũ (ũ causes pre-nasalization of the next word); Consonantal N(N likewise causes prenasalization of the next word) (ywobite 'to call and' > yoũte > yōde ; > yoNte > yonde)
- bu> Vocalicũ; no known consonantal outcome. (*sabu-sabu-si 'lonely'> saũsaũ > sōzō)
- mi > Vocalic ũ; not sure if there is an attestecd consonantal outcome,
- Frellesvig says N, but there I disagree and that's why I'm writing this blogpost (ko-miti 'small road' > koũti > kōji)
- mu > Vocalic ũ; not sure if there is an attested consonantal outcome, Frellesvig says N. *pi-muka 'personal name' < east) > piũka > hyūga).
- ki > Vocalic i; Consonantal C. (okite > oite; tuki-tati > tsuitachi; ikite'to go and' > iCte> itte [only example of consonantal outcome?]).
- ku > Vocalic u; no known consonantal outcome. (yoku 'well' > you > yō (not typically reduced in standard Japanese but seen in yōkoso 'welcome')
- gi > Vocalic ĩ; no known consonantal outcome. (tugite > tuĩde > tsuide)
- gu> Vocalic ũ; Consonantal N (kagupasi- 'fragrant' > kaũpasi > kōbashī; > kaNpasi > kanbashī; But also a non-reduced form (a loan from the literary language?) survives: kagupasi > kaguwashī.
- ni> Consonantal N; no known vocalic outcome. sinite 'to die and' > siNte > shinde.
However, these are not the only reductions of such syllables attested in the language. Especially the nasal syllables, i.e. mi, mu and ni leave no syllabic trace whatsoever, but instead purely leave a trace as pre-nasalization.
Thus pi-muka(si)'turning to the sun; east', same etymology as hyūga about in Modern Japanese becomes higashi 'east'.
ko-miti 'small road' shows up as a surname kodi> koji こぢ 【小路】
uri-nipa 'selling courtyard' > uriba(but nipa uncompounded has no reduction and becomes niwa 'garden' these days ba can also be used on its own outside of compounds with a specialized meaning "place")
pumi-te 'writing+hand' > fude not funde
This last one is especially puzzling because a phonetically identical verbal form pumite 'to step and' does have a Consonantal outcome: funde.
Frellesvig considers these non-moraic outcomes to be part of the same shift, and thus neglects to explain how pumite"brush" and pumite "to step and" would have different outcomes. As I understand it, the reason why these two shifts are considered part of the same shift is because they continued to be spelled historically so it's hard to see any historical layering that might be going on. Still I would be inclined to see this in two different layers.
What is striking about the forms that have only pre-nasalization as a trace is that they are all nominal compounds, whereas the moraic onbin changes occur both before morphological suffixes and in nominal compounds. This is a weird distribution, since if anything 'suffixes' are more part of the preceding word (and thuse suspectible to reductions sooner) than compounds, which may still be treated as somewhat separate words.
It is perhaps attractive to think of forms such as fumite 'to step and' as infinitive fumi 'stepping' + an auxiliary verb te, and that these were still considered separate words at the time that pumite 'brush' was a compound. And at this stage a first reduction of mi, mu and ni took place yielding only to pre-nasalization. And then in a later stage the full set of true onbin changes take place. But it seems to me that this is not so easy. The -te gerund suffix has been around from the Old Japanese period, and there is nothing to suggest that it was considered a separate word except the difference in behaviour that we see here.
But taking the difference in behaviour as the reason to analyse this as a separate word, is of course circular. It has to be a separate word because it behaves differently, and because it behaves differently we conclude it was a separate word. This may not even be wrong just unfalsifiable and unprovable.
Then there is of course the issue of pairs like higashi and hyūga which both seem to come from the same compound *pi-muka-, where the latter avoided the proposed early compound reduction while the form did not. This could be understood perhaps as the same compound being re-compounded at a later stage, after *pi-mukasi turned into pigasi and the form was no longer understood to be such a compound.
There is no satisfying solution to this for me yet, just trying out some thoughts... It's difficult to find the examples of compounds where only pre-nasalization is left, in part because authors tend to just consider them part of onbin changes, and not a separate sub-group (which it should be, whatever solution you come to). fude, -ba, koji and higashi are the only ones I'm aware of. Are they the only once around? Are there more? Would love to hear from anyone who knows of a list of such forms. Might be easier to to make sense of the patterns that way.
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There is still the other issue that even the Moraic onbin changes are by no means regular. Where *nipi-ta gives us nyūta, the normal non-onbun outcome of nipi is well-attested in place names and some words too:
*nipi-duma > nihizuma > nīzuma 'new wife', not **nyūzuma
*nipi-gata > nīgata (a placename), not **nyūgata
*nipi-pada > nīhada 'skin where two lovers first touch'
This last one is clearly a recent compound as hada did not even undergo the expected shift to wada. The regular outcome should have been nyūwada. And this might the the "solution" to understanding these compounds, they might be compounds that all post-date the onbin changes. In many cases that seems defensible, and even in the cases where the compound does predate the onbin changes, they were probably morphologically transparent enough for them to be analogically re-compounded without the onbin changes at a later stage.
Anyway, those are my thoughts for now. Again: happy to hear of other examples of compounds where *mi, *mu and *ni only yield pre-nasalization, without a moraic N or ũ.
