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Information about Rendaku

Rendaku (連濁 lit. "sequential voicing") is a phenomenon in Japanese morphophonology which governs the voicing of the initial consonant of the non-initial portion of a compound or prefixed word. Rendaku is a common but unpredictable phenomenon in modern Japanese. The "voicing" is not a strict change from voiceless to voiced sounds, but rather the action of adding a dakuten to the first kana of the portion being altered. It is also known as "sequential voicing".

Rendaku can be seen in the following:
[hito] + [hito] > [hitobito] ("person" + "person" → "people")
[te] + [kami] > [tegami] ("hand" + "paper" → "letter")

Properties blocking rendaku

Research into defining the range of situations affected by rendaku has largely been limited to finding circumstances which cause the phenomenon not to manifest itself.

Lyman's Law

The most famous of the conditions affecting rendaku is known as Lyman's Law, which stated that rendaku does not occur if the second consonant of the second element is a voiced obstruent. This was later modified to state that rendaku does not occur when the second element of the compound contains a voiced obstruent in any position (see third example below). This is considered to be one of the most fundamental of the rules governing rendaku.

[yama] + [kaji] > [yamakaji], not *[yamagaji] ("mountain" + "fire" > "forest fire") (* indicates an unacceptable form)
[hitori] + [tabi] > [hitoritabi], not *[hitoridabi] ("one person" + "travel" > "alone")
[tsuno] + [tokage] > [tsunotokage], not *[tsunodokage] ("horn" + "lizard" > "horned lizard")


While this law is named after Benjamin Smith Lyman who independently discovered it in 1894, it is really a re-discovery. The Edo period linguists Kamo no Mabuchi [1] [2] (1765) and Motoori Norinaga [3] [4] (1767-1798) separately and independently discovered the law during the 18th century.

Lexical properties

Similar to Lyman's Law, it has been found that for some lexical items, rendaku does not manifest itself if there is a voiced obstruent near the morphemic boundary, including preceding the boundary.

Some lexical items tend to resist rendaku voicing regardless of other conditions, while some tend to accept it.

Rendaku also occurs infrequently in Sino-Japanese words (Japanese words of Chinese origin) - although see the first example below where the second element is well integrated ('vulgarized') - and hardly ever in foreign lexical items:

[kabushiki] + [kaisha] > [kabushikigaisha] ("stock" + "company" > "corporation")
[aisu] + [kōhii] > [aisukōhii], not *[aisugōhii] ("ice" + "coffee" > "iced coffee")

Semantics

Rendaku also tends not to manifest itself in compounds which have the semantic value of "X and Y" (so-called dvandva or copulative compounds):

[yama] + [kawa] > [yamakawa] "mountains and rivers"


Compare this to [yama] + [kawa] > [yamagawa] "mountain river."

Branching constraint

Finally, rendaku is also blocked by what is called a "branching constraint". The process is blocked in the second element of a right-branching compound:

[mon] + ([shiro + chō]) > [monshirochō], not *[monjirochō] ("family crest" + {"white" + "butterfly"} > "cabbage butterfly")
but
([o] + [shiro]) + [washi] > [ojirowashi] ({"tail" + "white"} + "eagle" > "white-tailed eagle")

Further considerations

Despite a number of rules which have been formulated to help explain the distribution of the effect of rendaku, there still remain many examples of words in which rendaku manifests in ways currently unpredictable. Some instances are linked with a lexical property as noted above but others may obey laws yet to be discovered. Rendaku thus remains partially unpredictable, sometimes presenting a problem even to native speakers, particularly in Japanese names, where rendaku occurs or fails to occur often without obvious cause. In many cases, an identically written name may either have or not have rendaku, depending on the person; e.g., 中田 may be read in a number of ways, including both Nakata and Nakada.

Notes

1. ^ Itō, 1928
2. ^ Suzuki, 2004
3. ^ Endō, 1981
4. ^ Yamaguchi, 1988

References

See also

External links

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B>Morphophonology (also morphophonemics, morphonology) is a branch of linguistics which studies:
  • The phonological structure of morphemes.
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In phonetics, phonation is the "use of the laryngeal system to generate an audible source of acoustic energy, i.e., sound, which can then be modified by the articulatory actions of the rest of the vocal apparatus.
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consonant is a sound in spoken language that is characterized by a closure or stricture of the vocal tract sufficient to cause audible turbulence. The word consonant
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In phonetics, voice or voicing is one of the three major parameters used to describe a sound. It is usually treated as a binary parameter with sounds being described as either voiceless (unvoiced) or voiced
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In phonetics, voice or voicing is one of the three major parameters used to describe a sound. It is usually treated as a binary parameter with sounds being described as either voiceless (unvoiced) or voiced
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obstruent is a consonant sound formed by obstructing outward airflow, causing increased air pressure in the vocal tract.

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Benjamin Smith Lyman (b. 1835, Northampton, Massachusetts - d. 1920) was an American mining engineer.

He graduated from Harvard University in 1855, then studied at the Ecoles des Mines in Paris (1859 -1861), and at the Freiburg (Saxony) Mining Academy (1861 - 1862).
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This is a Japanese name; the family name is Kamo.
Kamo no Mabuchi (Japanese: 賀茂真淵; 24 April 1697-27 November 1769) was a Japanese poet and philologist of the Edo period.
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Motoori Norinaga (Japanese: 本居宣長; 21 June 1730–5 November 1801) was a Japanese scholar of Kokugaku during the Edo period. He is probably the best known and most prominent of all scholars in this tradition.
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lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes.

The lexicon includes the lexemes used to actualize words. Lexemes are formed according to morpho-syntactic rules and express sememes.
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In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. In spoken language, morphemes are composed of phonemes (the smallest linguistically distinctive units of sound), and in written language morphemes are composed of graphemes (the
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A dvandva or copulative or coordinative compound refers to two or more objects that could be connected in sense by the conjunction 'and'. Dvandvas are common in some languages such as Sanskrit, where the term originates, as well as Chinese and Japanese, but less common in English
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Japanese names (人名 jinmei)
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Nakata (中田 Nakata)
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