The AcademiblogLanguage::Random Japanese o' the moment
Posted: Thu Sep 28, 09:33 PM
Whee to celebrate my first actual posting here in .. a very long time, something I learned today that is rather cool. I’m not a linguist by training, so this is all a detailing of what I heard in class and found reasonable, don’t use me as a citation for serious work. Please.
For anyone who’s studied modern japanese, it probably felt weird that the character ‘は’ ‘ha’ was prounced ‘wa’ when it was a particle. Same with ‘へ’ ‘he’ being ‘e’. Finally, today, sitting in on the History of the Japanese Language class, we discussed probable reasons why.
We started looking at the Muromachi period today, which was historically marked as between 1336 to 1573. And during this time, there we have phonetic information from the Portuguese jesuit missionaries who wrote dictionarise, and other materials such as a Korean transcription of the japanese Iroha poem, a poem that uses all the kana in the writing system only once. Some blurry scans of the only copy of a 1492 (I think) korean text of the poem is here.
What could be seen is that kana like the now-obsolete ‘ゑ’ ‘we’ was being pronounced ‘ye’, as well as ‘he’ of the time being pronounced ‘ye’. Also, from other works (which sadly I don’t have the source citation for), we see the word ‘yaharaka” which eventually becomes the modern ‘yawaraka’ (soft). Also, during the same period, ‘前’ (front, mordern ‘mae’) was being pronounced at the time ‘maye’. Also, this was observed only for h-sounds in the middle of words, I believe, initial h’s were still true to form.
So, with these examples, we could hypothesize that the ha-line of sounds, slowly changed to wa-line sounds, and some changed to ya-line, and then eventually dropped away in some cases. The fact that we still write it ‘は’ for particle ‘wa’ is because of a tradition of maintaining traditional spellings that eventually morphed into a standard.
The mystery might not exactly be solved, and there’s probably some scholarly article on the topic from long ago, but, for my little layman self, this feels pretty darned satisfying.