# 平壌: Old Japanese vowel variations



## Nino83

Hello everybody.

Could anyone explain how 平壤 has become _hē jō_ (its phonological history)?

I understand 壤:
_ɲɨɐŋ > ziau > jau > jō_
but 平?
_bieŋ > pieŋ > hieĩ > hiei > hiē_? (why has the "i" disappeared?)

Mod note:
The thread has been branched from here in order to focus on a phonetic phenomenon in Old Japanese.


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## Flaminius

平 is said to have had _e1_ for the vowel in the seventh century.  This is a theory proposed out of observations on how words with I, E, O vowels were represented by Chinese characters back then.  It has been known from the earliest days of the study of Japanese that _Kojiki_, _Nihonshoki_ and _Maňňyōshū_ used two groups of characters for what is recognised as a single E vowel (ditto with I and O).  For instance, _Ayamegusa_ can be spelt as 安夜*売*具左 and 安夜*女*具佐 but never 安夜*米*具佐 in _Maňňyōshū_; here is a list of words with _me1_ (not all syllables have complemantary distributions of Chinese characters, so the lists are by syllables).

There are a few theories on the pronunciations of vowel groups.  Now, one of them holds that _e1_ was _je_.  If we accept that, 平 was _*pjeŋ_ in the earliest stage of its history in Japanese.  I marked it with asterisk because the velar nasal never have had a representation of its own.  Anyway, a number of phonetic changes took place to bring about _hē_ from the ideal form: *p > h, *je > e and *ŋ > i.  The only sound change I can present with historical evidence is ei > ē.  Velar nasals morphing into a vowel sounds weird but there are other examples such as for 王; *waŋ > wau > ou > ō.


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## Nino83

Thank you very much, Flaminius.

I've seen that the disappearance of the "y" [j] is found also with other vowels, for example 行 客 白 gyou gyaku byaku > kau kaku haku, in the passage from Go-on to Kan-on. Could it be related to this phenomenon?


Flaminius said:


> The only sound change I can present with historical evidence is ei > ē.


True, I think this is one of the problems. Do you know since when hiragana started to be used in order to "spell" pronunciation in Japnese? I guess during Middle Japanese there were not treaties on pronunciation using hiragana, am I right?


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## ktdd

Nino83 said:


> since when hiragana started to be used in order to "spell" pronunciation in Japnese?


I think you will find the introduction section of this book a very interesting read, Nino.


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## Flaminius

Nino83 said:


> Could it be related to this phenomenon?


This phenomenon is called 上代特殊仮名遣 and it only pertains to vowels I, E, O.  Your examples, prima facie, need be looked at from a different perspective.


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## Nino83

Really interesting chapter, ktdd. Thanks!
Thanks, Flaminius.

It raised another question, i.e why the Chinese haven't created an alphabet, at least for foreign (Sanskrit) words at the point that nowdays they cannot borrow foreign words, for example 電腦 (electric brain) instead of コンピューター or 軟件 (the vague "soft item") instead of ソフトウェア, so that many international terms will be absent from the Chinese languages. But it could be a question for another thread.

A last question. Did the change from ŋ to ũ or ĩ depend on the quality of the peceding vowel, i.e if it was palatal or velar?
aŋ, oŋ, uŋ > aũ, oũ, uũ (velar ŋ > ũ)
eŋ, iŋ > eĩ, iĩ (palatal, ŋ > ĩ)
so that:
鋼 => kaŋ > kaũ > kau > kou > kō
平 => bieŋ > pieŋ > hieĩ > hiei > hei > hē

Or was this change casual, not related to the preceding vowel?


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## ktdd

There was never a /ŋ/ sound in the Japanese sound system, and originally /n/ only occurred at the beginning of a syllable. In fact Japanese is quite like Italiano in that for native words all syllables must end in vowel. The kana for syllabic n ん・ン appeared much later and is not included in 五十音図 or 伊呂波歌 and that is saying something. Before the contact with Chinese, Japanese had a very simple syllable structure not unlike that of Polynesian languages. The 撥音(ん), 促音(っ) and 拗音(きゃ/きゅ/きょ/etc) all developed under the Chinese influence.

As we know, Middle Chinese syllables can end in m, n, ŋ, p, t, k. So accommodations must be made for Chinese loanwords. For -p/t/k, a weak vowel (i/u) is added. For -m and -n, み/む is used at the early stages (e.g. 文＝ふみ) and later on ん after its invention (文＝ぶん). As for -ŋ, an extra syllable (a/o/u+う, e/i+い) is used to emulate the Chinese sound the best they can. So in a sense 長音 is also a Chinese influence (there are later sound changes in Japanese, i.e. au/ou->ō which happened during classical times, and ei->ē which is ongoing).

The examples in #3 (行 客 白 gyou gyaku byaku > kau kaku haku), as I understand, happened in Chinese rather than in Japanese. Go-on (呉音) is based on the Wu region (around Shanghai-Suzhou-Nanjing) dialect of the Northern and Southern dynasties (南北朝) period. Kan-on (漢音) is most likely based on the official language spoken in the capital city of the Tang dynasty, Changan (present-day Xi'an). So it's really a difference between Early Middle Chinese and Late Middle Chinese (for example, the loss of voiced obstruents is clearly reflected in the two readings).

By the way, there are phonetic loanwords in Chinese, from the ancient ones like 葡萄(grape), 琵琶(pipa), 佛(Buddha) to the more modern ones like 沙發(sofa), 吉普(jeep), 維他命(vitamin) though the number is far less than it is in Japanese - probably because we haven't been occupied by Americans, but also probably because our ancestors stopped short of developing an alphabet/syllabary.


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## Nino83

Thank you!


ktdd said:


> The examples in #3 (行 客 白 gyou gyaku byaku > kau kaku haku), as I understand, happened in Chinese


That really helps!


ktdd said:


> the number is far less than it is in Japanese - probably because we haven't been occupied by Americans


But also the Russians have компьютер and имейл (alongside электронная почта, borrowed from Italian _posta_, via Polish _poczta_), and we have _computer_ (alongside _elaboratore, calcolatore_, and we should use _computatore_ from the Latin word _computare > contare = to count_, lit. _counter_) and _email_ (alongsinde _posta elettronica_). It's not all geopolitics. 


ktdd said:


> but also probably because our ancestors stopped short of developing an alphabet/syllabary


I've found a work (Orthographic  Constraints on the  Integration of English Loan words in Mandarin Chinese, by Feiyang Tian) where it is said:


> it, first of all, has to be processed in Chinese people’s mind, analyzed as meaningful characters and then decided whether it can be accepted or not. When it turns out to be that the combination of the several characters that make up an English word does not make any sense in Chinese, the word will most probably be replaced by a semantic loan or loan translation or simply be discarded.


It seems it has more to do with the monosyllabic nature of Sinitic languages and with their orthography (one syllable, one meaning, one character) while in Japanese (like in Russian, in Austronesian languages and in many other languages) these words are phonetically compatible, since Japanese is a polysyllabic (and inflected) language and its nature is, probably, the reason why they developed an alphabet.


ktdd said:


> As for -ŋ, an extra syllable (a/o/u+う, e/i+い) is used to emulate the Chinese sound the best they can.


I've asked it because I've found that 幸 in Middle Chinese was pronounced /ɦˠɛŋX/ but in Japanese it is pronounced _kō_ through, probably _kaũ > kau > kō_ (i.e we have a _ũ_ when the preceding vowel is palatal, ɛ).


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## ktdd

Yes, Chinese is monosyllabic and lacks inflections, so the need for an alphabet isn't as great.


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