Teach Yourself Japanese
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Subject: Re: palatalization and nasal sounds
From: bamboo1
Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2003 14:19:32 GMT
References: 1
> I think I remember reading somewhere that the Japanese language originally lacked palatal and nasal sounds. Interestingly when kana was first created there were no symbols for っ and ん. And palatal sounds were not written with the now standard ょ, etc.
>
> I don't know how much we can really know for sure but when Kanji was first introduced to Japan did the palatal/nasal sounds come into the language right away or did it take several hundred years for them to circulate from the speech of the upper classes throughout the whole language? I think I remember reading that it took several hundred years before the conventions for writing nasal and palatal sounds in kana were adopted, but before then, it could just be that only Japanese words were written in kana and words from Chinese were kept in Chinese so there was no need for nasal/palatal kana. But I could be wrong. Which is it?
The Japanese language (yamato kotoba) always had what you describe as "nasal and platal sounds" but did not have specfic means to write them down. For example, "nippon" was pronounced as such but it was written as 日本, because back in those days there was no way to write "nippon" as actually pronounced, as a result of which the pronunciation of "nihon" came about.
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