The Phonology of Eighth-Century Japaneseby Roland A. Lange

The Phonology of Eighth-Century Japanese by Roland A. LangeReview by: Gerald B. MathiasThe Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Vol. 9, No. 2/3 (Jul., 1974), pp. 62-76Published by: American Association of Teachers of JapaneseStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/489371 .

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62

Roland A. Lange. The Phonology of Eighth-century Japanese. Tokyo: Sophia University. 1973. vii + 178 pp. $15.00.

It has been over half a century since Hashimoto Shinkichi in 1917 brought it to the attention of the scholarly world--for the third time, actually, following Motoori Norinaga in 1764 and his student Ishizuka Tatsumaro some years later--that certain distinctions had been made in the earliest use of kana that were not made after the Nara period. Hashimoto and his audience were better able than the 18th century linguists to appreciate the fact that the significance of the kana distinctions was as evidence of phonological distinctions which were lost shortly after the Japa- nese began writing their language. Even so, the study of Old Japanese (OJ) phonology has remained an esoteric by-way in the already rather esoteric field of Japanese linguistics. Even in Japanese it is difficult to find a better introduction to the study than the brief one by Ono Susumu in Ichikawa and Hattori (1955:265-271,275-278). Similar cursory descriptions of OJ phonology may be found in most relatively recent histories of the Japanese language and often in books on Japanese-language literature of the OJ period. But the student who would learn more has been likely to find himself confronted with narrowly focussed and/or highly technical treatises such as Dno Susumu (1956), with its assumption of prior knowledge of such terms as _*~ or -TL .Z, or the intimidatingly thick Ono T6ru (1962).

The hurdles have not been insurmountable for someone with a keen enough interest in the matter and reasonable competence in reading Japanese, but it helps to be Japanese, or at least study in Japan. Until quite recently (Wenck 1954-7, the sheer mass of which must be forbidding to those of us who do not dream in Ger- man), a list of relevant materials in Western languages might have begun and ended with Yoshitake (1934). Unless he was fortu- nate enough to have a teacher who had gone the route before him, the Western student of OJ phonology has been forced to track his own way through the wilds of "ko-otsu distinctions" and the Chinese "sound tables." Small wonder, then, that linguists of Japanese who have not specialized in OJ phonology, even embarking into areas where that phonology is significant, have been inclined to acknowledge that there were certain additional distinctions in it and then ignore them (Yokoyama 1950, Martin 1966 for example). Less wonder that a non-linguist might perpetuate the notion that kami "deity" and kami "upper part" are etymologi-



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cally identical, unaware that the syllable mi in those words had different ancestries (Reischauer and Fairbank 1960:472). Until 1967, a serious student of Japanese culture lacking a particular interest in historical linguistics might have attained no more than a vague notion that there are certain mysteries in the earliest Japanese transcriptions.

Miller (1967) marks a turning point in two ways. First, it sets the facts before the English-reading public unequivocally. It can no longer be acceptable to ignore OJ vocalic distinctions in treating the history of Japanese or in etymologizing, as if they might be mere esoteric flights of fancy. Second, in its Notes it provides a guide to the most important writings on the subject, thus providing for us all "a teacher who has gone the route before." Still, the leap from Miller to the works in his guide sometimes spans quite a technical abyss, particularly where knowledge of Chinese linguistics is requisite.

Roland Lange laid a bridge across that abyss in 1968 with his dissertation, now revised and published, and the subject of this review. Seeking to reconstruct the phonemic system of eighth-century Japanese, Lange opts to build on a foundation of one aspect of examination of written records: the Japanese graphic system is largely based on the Chinese readings of the Chinese characters which are its elements, providing a link to Japanese phonology from external knowledge of Chinese phonology, Lange gives properly slight attention to the comparative method, in view of the present state of knowledge of the relationship of Japanese to other languages, but he errs in almost totally ignoring internal evidence, beyond replicating the process of discov- ering the syllabic distinctions in question and assigning them to the vocalism of the syllable rather than the consonant. Since internal evidence sometimes conflicts sharply with Lange's interpretation of the Chinese evidence, there is great potential dan- ger in ignoring it, but as will be seen below internal evidence in fact invalidates only four syllables (on the basis of just one error) of the 82 he reconstructs.1 On balance, the meticulous development of the approach the author chooses, beginning at step one and proceeding cautiously step by step to his conclusions with tight logic and leaving almost no assumption unexamined, makes this one of the best publications on OJ phonology to date and certainly the most important in English.

One could even accuse Lange of too much caution. Some of his source citations are unnecessary. One would be willing to allow that he might know through introspection that "in order to find the phonetic values for [the recurring units found in written records] we must work from some sort of known phonetic data ..."--no need for support from Penzl and Bloomfield (2-3).



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Lange's native modesty ironically leads him to inject himself into his work where personal reference only gets in the way. The "I feel ... that" can be deleted from "I feel, however, that a certain fact about yoon is not decisive proof that other, or even similar, yoon did not exist at an earlier period" (44); the statement is a fact, independent of anyone's feelings. Such expressions rarely couch inadequately supported opinions, but they tend to give the arguments a false air of weakness, and I hope that Lange will consider modifying them in later editions. The description of one method of kundoku (10-11) is also perhaps superfluous, but in no way detracts from the value of the book. Far from superfluous is the Glossary of Sources and Technical Terms Used in Chinese and Japanese Linguistics included as Appen- dix A (135-48)--this constitutes something of a mini-course in Japanese historical linguistics in itself. Its value would be enhanced, however, with the addition of the Sino-Japanese readings of the Chinese terms, which are of course also used by the Japanese.

Lange carefully impresses on his readers that reconstructions of Chinese can only offer phonetic suggestions as to how the Japanese syllables were pronounced, and in Chapter IV, The Reconstruction of Man'yoshi Sound Values, he repeatedly points out that the Japanese must often have had to ignore certain features of pronunciation in order to take advantage of more important similarities. These are important points and never too obvious to bear repeating. Every reader of this journal experi- ences the problems involved in finding best matches whenever he writes a non-Japanese word with kana, but an experiment that can recapture them with fresh vividness is to try to create a new man'y6gana based on Mandarin. Or suppose OJ had a 'th' sound [e] or a lateral affricate [ti: what Chinese initial would have been chosen to represent them?

In Chapter III Lange re-examines the reconstruction of the Chinese dialect which he views as the most likely one for the

early Japanese to have been exposed to (71) and concludes with a list of 156 finals (numbered 1-139, of which 17 have two subsets each) as reconstructed by Karlgren and with revisions where necessary. He then proceeds, in Chapter IV, to determine which phonetic aspects of the Chinese were significant to the phonemic system of OJ. It is a complex business, which Lange undertakes in a rational manner. A number of puzzles remain, however. One question that could be discussed further is whether the Japanese used characters for their precise Chinese values, or for their nearest Japanese equivalents. Needless to say, every character's Chinese reading had a nearest Japanese equivalent, such as was forced on it in the development of Sino-Japanese readings. But the fact that a number of Chinese phonological forms that must



have had fairly natural nearest Japanese equivalents were discrim- inated against suggests that the Japanese were indeed sensitive to subtle Chinese distinctions. For example, Chinese -a(-) and

-a(-) were used frequently--most OJ ancestors of Japanese -a were written with characters read with one or the other of these Chi- nese vowels--while -a- was never used for any OJ syllable. That is, even though the Japanese apparently felt, judging from the goon, that such Chinese words as Sin (DJ) sounded more like sen- (seni? senu?) than anything else, they were not enough like that to allow the use of Lb for OJ se, etc.

As for -_a(-) and -a(-) both being used for OJ -a, one is free to suppose that the Japanese could distinguish between the Chinese sounds, but wavered in their judgment as to which was more like the Japanese. This gets us to a stickier problem, however. In at least two instances ($ ka for OJ ke,3 -t ng for OJ ge), Chinese -a was used to transcribe not OJ -a, but -e. It is difficult to maintain the same type of supposition--i.e. that the

Japanese vacillated in regarding the Chinese vowel as more like OJ -a or OJ -e--in face of the absolute consistency with which the Japanese used certain -u characters for -a and others for -e. The consistent use of -i nuo for OJ nu, while , V , and c , differing from k. only in tone, were just as consistently used for no, is another instance of the same sort of problem.

Are we looking at the wrong Chinese dialect? Lange supports his choice of dialect (which just happens to be the one for which there is sufficient evidence) on the grounds that, being a status

dialect, it was the one most likely to have been taught to the

Japanese (71). This argument is weak to the extent that we can not say with certainty that the teachers, who may have been immi-

grants from remoter areas of China, or Koreans, were masters of the Chinese prestige dialect. Still, in light of the fact that -ip ka (OJ ka) and '$ ka (OJ ke) are homonymous in all known Chi- nese and Sino-Xenic dialects save goon, it would be going out on a limb to propose an unknown, lost Chinese dialect as a solution to these problems, granting that the solution must lie out on some limb or other.

On the other hand, if we accept the dialect, we are forced to question some aspects of its reconstruction. The fact that there is enough disagreement among scholars about details of the reconstruction that Lange and others may still suggest revisions

permits us to do so. Add the fact that the system of Ancient/ Middle Chinese phonology has yet to be elucidated to the extent that the systematic gaps are all accounted for in a natural way (a necessity for a finished product that only Hashimoto [1965 --

notably absent from Lange's bibliography--has put foremost), and the validity of the putative phonetic details stands in reason-



66

able doubt.

Here is a case in point. To transcribe OJ ya, characters with reconstructed Chinese readings ia were used. For ye, the choice was i-_ (i, idu, and others4)); for yo, iwo (without glottal-stop initial: lwo = OJ o), etc. Obviously Chinese i-

corresponds to OJ y- in these cases. In other cases, however, i- does not correspond with y-. E.g., OJ u was transcribed T or

, ju (Karlgren jiu), or t , iau (Karlgren jiu). Lange explains that since ju, alongside .uo (e.g. ^, also used for OJ

), was the closest Chinese equivalent to OJ u, the Japanese were forced to ignore the i- in order to achieve a satisfactory match. This is an entirely reasonable explanalion for those characters' use as man'yogana, but it cannot explain the related fact that the goon for those characters is likewise u. And note that Sino- Korean concurs in reading T and '~ u, not yu.5 Obviously, it is either the case that goon and Sino-Korean do not relate directly to the reconstructed Chinese dialect, or else that the Chinese reconstruction tends to be phonemic, lu perhaps representing something like [fw], with an allophone of i that was subliminal to Japanese and Korean ears.

Given the existence of such doubtful points in the external evidence Lange employs, it is after all somewhat surprising and encouraging that, as noted above, his reconstruction of OJ conflicts with the internal evidence at only four points, those being the interpretation of the following sets:

k 1* ' Ch. k'lai (Karlgren k'ei /kje l- I Ch. ki (Karlgren kjei)

f +t Ch. kei (Karlgren kiei) k_ X e Ch. ka /ke/

I Ch. kei (Karlgren kiei)

se 4-i Ch. nga /ge/

^ZL J: Ch. ngie (Karlgren ngjie) /gje/

It will be shown below why the reconstructions of e and e must be reversed in these cases.

I observed above that a complete analysis of Middle Chinese phonology must account for systematic gaps in the syllable inventory. The same holds true for OJ, and in fact it is the system that holds the best clues to OJ phonology. However, where the Chinese provided a wealth of clues to their phonological system in the form of rhyme dictionaries, sound tables, and fan ch'ieh, the pre-Heian Japanese were almost obnoxiously anti-systematic.



67

Had Japanese civilization perished at the end of the Nara period, leaving behind only its writings, it is doubtful that they could ever have been deciphered. It is only the establishment of the "fifty sound table" in the Heian period and the traditions that allow us to map OJ onto that table and ultimately onto modern Japanese that enable us to see the system of OJ phonology. After that mapping, which Lange for the most part assumes, citing the evidence of old transcriptions in hiragana of OJ material (99), one is able to determine through an investigation of the OJ spelling of individual words that not only were there distinct seion and dakuon sets for the appropriate single "fifty sound table" categories but also certain additional subsets--this is the discovery mentioned in the first paragraph of this review--so that corresponding to the Heian kana set for ki, for example, there were two OJ sets corresponding to the seion and two to the dakuon. Lange goes through the evidence that shows the latter distinction to belong, systematically, to the vocalism rather than the consonant (26-27). It is to the formal nature of these vocalic distinctions that he addresses himself.

In order to use only ongana of the highest validity, Lange re-establishes the subsets with three rigid criteria (102). One of the criteria involves potentially dangerous assumptions, and to a degree begs the question, but there is no way to completely avoid doing so. The criterion in question is that to be consi- dered as representing the same sound, two ongana 'must share the same environment in at least two forms" (102). This means that 8? and PFj can be correlated by virtue of both .t and P1repre- senting the same word aki 'autumn,' or both '. and 1)L* spelling the same word ame 'heaven.' Since both i,.- and fiti cannot be the same word aki unless both ! and"}i are a, this is slightly circular. Little harm is done, however, with the possible exception of putting X into the same set with , ~r , and /j on the basis of both being used to write ito 'very' (163); scholars

currently see two OJ ito, namely ito and itd, with slight semantic differences (Sakakura 1966:262ff).

In addition to not positing a to, other generally accepted subsets which Lange finds insufficiently evidenced are di, z6, rj, and yo. The last of these seems to be an error, since the data he presents (164) do not allow linking the set of J and ? (y6) with the set of /., , and .J- (y6) by his own criteria. The other rejected subsets are admittedly somewhat inclined to confu-

sion, yet they can be adequately established for the eighth cen-

tury. Consider the kana for to: 7- , n , f4 , and 9~. Judging from the listings in the index in volume 19 of the Man'yoshu Taisei, 4% is used about half as frequently as 17, * twice as

frequently as 7 , and T four times as frequently, which is to say that the likelihood of i being used for to is a little more than



68

1/8th. Now, /J is used at least seven times in the Man'y5shu in the spelling of the following words, in which the (-)to(-) is

etymologically "door, passageway": to "door," kanato "gate," asatode "going outdoors in the morning," tonari "neighbor," minato "port." Given the relative frequency of to kana, one would predict that the other three would be found for a total of seven times the frequency of 7 in these words, about fifty times: but in fact there is not one single instance of any of the three so used. Only 77 is used to spell tafuto- "noble" (three times), and 27 is the character used in the single instance of togankki "hemlock," a doublet, apparently of the not infrequent o -u type, with tuganoki. Even though the source of these forms is not necessarily the text of the Man'yoshu that Lange selects as the least corrupted (19), such regular discrimination against ' , "t , and ' could hardly result from haphazard copying errors, and we must assume that 77 constitutes a set (to) in itself.

As to the failure to posit a z6 i z6 distinction, this is a result of the extreme rarity of z6- Z6 occurs in only one Man'yoshu lexical item, kaz6f- "count," and that item is spelled out only twice in the text, once with the unique occurrence of the kana f' in OJ literature, and once with a kana for s6. But the Chinese reading for 1'e is ziwok/zwiok; z- in ongana always corresponds to OJ z-, and two other instances of the final type, in ~, and )f], represent -6. These facts, taken with the relationship of kaz6f(e)- to attested kazu "number," should allow one to posit 1'S as z6 and v andV as zb with a fair amount of con- fidence. Similar arguments make a case for At as d6, with the remainder of the do kana as dd, and for M- and }^ as rb, g as rd; these cases are not as strong as that for t6o t6, but stronger than the case for z6 i zo. Hence I will refer to all of these sets as attested, but one cannot really fault Lange for demanding stronger evidence.

If a representative of each man'y6gana set is mapped against the fifty sound table, and that table is rearranged to bring out the system most effectively, the chart at the top of the next page results. Now suppose, although it is very unlikely, that the mapping could have been accomplished without access to any Chinese or post-Heian materials, so that instead of a matrix of fairly concrete consonant and vowel coordinates we had to deal with purely abstract coordinates, say, positions X1 to X14 along an X axis and Y1 to Y8 along a Y axis, as given on the chart in parentheses. Suppose we know that each kana set represents a

syllable, and that one of the axes is consonants, the other is vowels. We want to reduce this abstract matrix to a set of rules so that all and only those sets which are attested can be derived from the formula Syl = Xn U Ym. There is a natural and obvious way to proceed toward this goal.



69

P M K T N p b m k I g t d n s

(Xl) (X2) (X3) (X4)i(X5) (X6)I(X7) (X8' (XS A (Y1) :/ , % !s V w 1X V It .

U (Y2) X t' . ,$ _ 0 ' S I I a

(Y3)1,, i ,V (Y4) e l ,? ) 'I)

46, A -g I R f 'I

(Y5) 6 *. 1t t w I

E (Y8)s 1- 1 It I- ^1I-

Representatives of Eighth-Century Ongana Sets Mapped Onto the Fifty Sound Table

(Relative position of sets within sections is to be regarded as arbitrary.)

First, we assume that the ordinates of each axis represent feature sets, no two of which are exactly alike. Then we note that these sets can be classed into largersets according to the results of the union of X sets with Y sets. E.g., X1, X2, X3, X13, and X14 are a subset of X by virtue of the fact that XnU Y3 = XnUY4, where n = 1, 2, 3, 13, or 14. We mark this by assigning an abstract feature fl to each of these sets: X1 = {xl, fl , X2 = {x2, flt, etc., where xl, x2, etc., represent unanalyzed subsets of features. Then, to account for the identity of the union of these sets with Y3 and Y4, we assign the same feature to one of the latter, say Y3 = {y3, fl}. Thus XlU Y3 = {xl, fl} U y3, fl= xl, y3, f xl, 3 l} = XlU Y4 = {xl, fl} U (y4} = {xl, fl, y4}, providing that y3 = y4, i.e. Y3 = {y4, fl). Similarly, we attribute a feature f2 to the elements of the set (X6, X7, X8, X9, X10, Xll, X12, X13, X14} defined by its behaviour in union with Y5 and Y6, with, arbitrarily, Y5 = (y6, f2}. X6-Xll and X14 form a set in terms of the results of union with Y7 and Y8. We might assign f3; however, if we take the option of treating the ambiguous demarcation at X12/X13, Y7/Y8 as a vertical one, we can handle this with f2 as well, making Y7 = {y8, f21. Pro-

ceeding in this fashion, with f3 a feature of Y2 and also of either X13 or X14, etc., one can accomplish the given goal.

The purpose of this little exercise is to support my conten- tion that the nature of OJ syllable structure is revealed to a

large extent by its system, even in the abstract. For when we compare the abstraction to what we know about the reality, we find that the abstract feature fl is uniquely a feature of labial consonants, with the exception of ' (X13), one of the two vowels



70

that have descended into o, and if we make the obvious equation of f3 with fl, the vowel u. Thus the feature in question is labial articulation. Similarly, f2 turns out to be a feature of, again excepting ', consonants and vowels with an apical or frontal articulation, if we are willing to allow that one each of the OJ ancestors of i and e had distinctly less such articulation than the other. Adopting the convention of transcribing labial articulation with w instead of fl and frontal articulation y instead of f2, and making certain other minor but obvious revisions and extensions, the following rules for OJ syllable structure are derived, which provide a very close approximation with the data.

Syl -- C V C - p/b/m/k/g/t/d/n/s/z/r/y/'/w V --> a/u/wo/o/ye/e/yi/i (where w and y represent dis-

tinctive features of the vowel, linearly transcribed arbitrarily to the left, not phonemes; wo is, e.g., a digraph with the features of o + labial articulation.)

p -- Pw (Where P = p - w, i.e., all the features of b -- Bw p except labial articulation; etc.) m -> Mw t -- Ty d -- Dy n - N Ny s - Sy z - Zy r -R> Ry

ww - W w; yy -- y; wu - u; ' - (blank)

Pw -> p; Bw - b; Mw -: m; Ty -i t; etc.

Graphically represented, the results of all possible C V combinations are:

p b m k g t d n s z r y I w a pa ba ma ka ga ta da na sa za ra ya a wa u pu bu mu ku gu tu du nu su zu ru yu u u wo po bo mo kwo gwo two dwo nwo swo zwo rwo ywo wo wo o po bo mo ko go to do no so zo ro yo o wo yi pyi byi myi kyi gyi ti di ni si zi ri yi yi wyi i pi bi mi ki gi ti di ni si zi ri yi li wi

ye pye bye mye kye gye te de ne se ze re ye ye wye e pe be me ke ge te de ne se ze re ye le we

It turns out that that this inventory of theoretically possible OJ syllables in a quasi-distinctive-feature transcription derived from an examination of the internal system is almost the



71

same as the phonemically transcribed inventory Lange produces through an examination of external evidence (124). (Note, however, that our inventory is not yet correlated with the standard ko-otsu syllable distinctions.) Where we have y, Lange has j, and Lange has a dot (for glottal stop) before otherwise initial vowels; these are mere cosmetic differences. Lange's -i corresponds to our yi--our i is unattested surplus, and his wi corresponds to our wyi--our wi is also unattested surplus, as is our wye, giving us a total of 90 syllables against the 87 of the standard inventory. In so far as no contrast between i and yi or wi and wyi is attested, the difference is relatively unimpor- tant; Lange's has simplicity to its credit, ours better fits the OJ morphemic system. The only other differences result from the correction of Lange's error in equating yo and ywo and from our

acceptance of such evidence as there is for two, dwo, zwo, and rwo. Thus it can be said that on the whole, the two approaches strongly support each other.

When it comes to correlating the forms with the ko-otsu syllables, however, internal and external evidence conflict sharply in four cases. Lange's reconstruction of -e syllables criss- crosses the ko-otsu categories:

Syl. type k6rui otsurui ke ke kje ge ge gje pe pje pe be bje be me mje me

Lange himself notes that relating this criss-crossing to verb morphology, the basis for the ko-otsu labeling, "means that

morphological and phonological categories did not parallel each other" (126) and demonstrates with the shimo-nidan verbs tab(e)- "eat" (not attested in OJ, but the form may have existed in the sense of "be granted" <tamaf(e)- id.) and kak(e)- "lack," the

conjugations of which would be in Lange's transcription as fol- lows:

mizenkei ren'ybkei shushikei rentaikei izenkei meireikei

tabe- tabe tabu taburu tabure tabe(jo)

kakje- kakje- kaku kakuru kakure kakje(jo)[?]

There are two ways to analyze these paradigms morphemically. If the roots are tab- and kak-, then there are alternate forms of the suffix(es) that form(s) the mizenkei, ren'yokei, and meireikei: -e(-) after tab- and -je(-) after kak-. One might account for this by positing two sources for the shimo-nidan paradigm which merged only when the distinction Ce i Cje was lost, but when we noted that -je(-) occurred just with roots with k and g



72

after all, the difference had a phonological basis. The other

possible morphemic analysis seems even stranger. If the suffixes in question are -e(-) throughout, we are left with alternating root forms . . .k-/.. .i- and . . .g-/. . .- for shimo-nidan verbs with velar finals.

Neither of these hypotheses could be categorically rejected, but let us consider some further evidence. The yodan verbs y6b- "call" and kak- "scratch" would conjugate like this:

mizenkei ren'yokei shushikei rentaikei izenkei meireikei

jwoba- jwobji jwobu jwobu jwobe jwobje kaka- kakji kaku kaku kakje kake

Here, the same ...be:...kje relationship as above holds (with all labial final and velar final roots respectively) for the izenkei, while the ren'y6kei has J in both instances and the relationship is even reversed for the meireikei' Consider further the stative verbs formed from yodan verbs probably from a contraction of the ren'yokei with ar(i)- "be (in a static relationship [with])," which would have, for these specimen verbs, the forms iwobier- "be calling" and kaker- "be scratching." Add the common -e : -a- alternation involved in noun compounding, as with sake "wine" : sakaduki "wine cup" and me "eye" : mabuta "eyelid"; Lange would make these sakje and me. Ke and mje would not be involved in such alternations.

This flipflopping of je : e is summarized for clarity in the following table: After velars After labials

shimo-nidan mizenkei (C) je e " ren'yokei (j) je e it meireikei () je e

yodan izenkei (A) je e " meireikei (t) e je

stative formation (t) e je nominal alternants () je e

Whosoever wishes to accept the Chinese evidence as Lange interprets it has the fearsome task of explaining these regular inconsistencies in uninterrelated morphological phenomena; in the meantime it is much more reasonable to conclude that e should be e after velars as well as after labials, and e always je.

There are a large number of misprints in the book, most of which Lange caught in time to add an errata sheet. Some that remain uncorrected follow:

READS SHOULD READ p. 1, line 1 of fn. Yokohama Yokoyama p. 35 line 22 d



73

READS SHOULD READ p. 35 line 23 p. 45 line 27 ch'u ch'u p. 75 line 7 century. century.' p. 96 no. 63 ia p. 105 line 27 ts' ts' p. 112 line 17 long wiong [? Cf. p98

line 2] p. 112 line 18 long wjok p. 131, line 3-4 of fn. we-zu uwe-zu p. 131, line 5 of fn. u# uu# p. 148 line 10 ch'u ch'ii p. 165 line 20 6p 227 (Delete; not

ongana) p. 165 line 35 o 4 149 (Delete; not

ongana. Contra consensus, ditto )tI 89)

p. 165 line 36 Q ~ p. 165 line 38 282 82

The characters identified as kungana in the sample poem on page 16 are simply kanji; there are no kungana--the term is correctly defined in the glossary (142)--in this poem. Ono's (presumably Ono Susumu's, not Ono Toru's) value for /6/ as of 1955 (the bibliography lists no Ono 1955) is given as [b] (69), but Ono 1957:190 has it [e], a mid central rounded vowel. The literal translation of hagy6 tenko on as "change in point of articulation of syllables in the /h/ column" strikes me odd, but I am no longer sure what a "literal translation" is (141).

I cannot agree with Lange that the transcription of the dialect poems in the Man'yoshu "indicates that the writing system of the time was based on an attempt to show the actual pronunciation of words, rather than upon a standardizing ... orthography" (100). The kana used to transcribe the dialect poems are exactly the same kana used to transcribe the standard language, though it is

hardly likely that there would have been a phonetic match-up between syllables in the standard and non-standard dialects. If what would be yeda (or jeda) "branch" in the standard language is written _ tI in a dialect poem, typical kana for standard OJ ya and de respectively, this must be a parody of the dialect form, no more representing that form phonetically than "erl goil" re-

presents what the Brooklynite calls the woman who lubes his car.

"Our knowledge of the sound system of the Heian Period central dialect" is cited at one point to confirm a voiceless-voiced consonant distinction postulated for OJ (114), but the basis for "our knowledge" should have been presented. My own limited know-



7h

ledge, ultimately based on others' study of such documents as the Ruijumyogish6, tells me only that there was some kind of two-way consonantal distinction that happens to parallel the voiced- voiceless distinction of modern Japanese.

Lange presents some good arguments that the loss of distinction between _ and i and between e and e left the palatalized forms rather than the unpalatalized in Heian and medieval Japa- nese (35-37, 129-131), although they are not quite conclusive. The development of /eu/> /yo:/ is only slightly stronger evidence for /e/ = [je] than the development of /fewe/ > /fyuw/ "few" would be for /e/ = [je] in an earlier stage of English. As for the hangul transcriptions of the Iroha/Ilopha of 1492 showing "a number of palatalized 'e syllables' which had disappeared by the time of the Portuguese material a century later" (36), this must be weighed with the fact that the Sh6kai shingo/Chephay sin.e 4\ $4 T4-A also seems to indicate palatalized e's. This Japanese language manual, believed to date from the end of the 16th century, revises such things as the f (W) which transcribes the ha-gyo consonant in the Iroha to h (-) and thus cannot be simply maintaining an earlier tradition. These transcriptions may, in short, be as significant for the interpretation of historical Korean phonology as Japanese. On the other hand, it is difficult to find counter-evidence to Lange's thesis. On the basis of an analogy with English, where the /u/ # /yu/ distinction is lost after frontally articulated consonants in many dialects, in favor of [u], e.g. "due" = "do" = [duw], I have felt it to be perhaps more likely that the neutralization of the hypothetically palatalized and non-palatalized varieties of e after t, etc., would result in a form without a palatal glide, in which case the progression OJ [te] > MedJ [tje] ModJ [te] would be a somewhat uncomfortable hypothesis, but Lange's arguments are persua- sive enough to convert me to a fence-straddler on this issue.

The study of Japanese historical phonology has been enriched by the publication of this book, for which Lange is to be con- gratulated and thanked.

Gerald B. Mathias (Indiana University)

Notes

1Standard theory has 87 syllables (88 in the Koiiki and portions of the Man'y6shU); there have been attempts to increase the inventory for the early documented period. Incidentally, I was asked to write this review at Lange's recommendation, testimony, since I had informed him that I strongly disagreed with him on certain unspecified points, to his scholarly and scientific frame



of mind, which also pervades his book.

2Even such unlikely sounds as these must be included among the candidates for the OJ ancestor of Japanese s. To represent OJ s- syllables, characters with both ts type affricates and a variety of sibilants were employed. Since both types of initial were used where there was no obstacle to selecting one over the other, the Japanese initial must not have been very much like either one. Lange wisely reconstructs only the feature of friction for the sound, transcribing /s/, while allowing that it may have been phonetically an affricate (116). The correspondence of the "fifty sound table" with the Sanskrit alphabet, where Japanese s goes with Sanskrit c, not s/s/s, also suggests the sound was no simple sibilant, though it was not likely a palatal stop, either.

3In this review, korui e, i, and o will be transcribed e, , and 6. Cf. Mathias (1973:42, fn 4).

4Lange neither accepts (110) nor explicitly rejects (165) the ye ongana . widi (Karlgren iwai) and V \ai. Presumably he encoun- tered neither in his corpus. Although both see some use in other OJ texts, I am able to pinpoint only one use of the former (in ?saye "dice," poem no. 3827) in non-dialect poems in the Mardyoshu, and none of the latter, so they are properly ignored.

5Modern Sino-Korean has yu for ~ , but the Hwunminceng.um.enhay P &Ki t~ >, the extant version of which dates from the late 16th century, renders it iuw (:'; the n is a puzzle), and except where Karlgren reconstructs "vocalic ingress" or dental/palatal ini- tials, the final -au is regularly u, not yu, in Sino-Korean. E.g. ,4 (Karlgren .Ju) ModK wu (), MidK "uw (~), where "presumably represents glottal stop.

6Even considering the extreme rarity of OJ z (about 1% of consonant occurrences) and 6 (about 3% of vowels), one would expect to find more instances of zo, perhaps a rate of something like one per thousand distinct lexical items. It is possible, but unlikely, that nozom- "look ahead," unattested in OJ kana, contains another instance of z6.

Incidentally, the distribution of 6, which is three to five times more likely to occur at obvious morpheme junctures than elsewhere, supports the hypothesis of Unger (1971) that it results from such contractions as au > and ua >. Thus kaz6f(e) might be kazu "number" + af(e)- "match." (Unger 1973:163 uses this ety- mology in support of kazu = "one s].")



76

References

HASHIMOTO, MANTARO J. 1965. Phonology of Ancient Chinese. University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

ICHIKAWA SANKI and HATTORI SHIRO. 1955. Sekai gengo gaisetsu, Vol. II. Kenkyusha, Tokyo.

MARTIN, SAMUEL Eo 1966. "Lexical evidence relating Korean to Japanese." Language 42.2:185-251.

MATHIAS, GERALD B, 1973. "On the modification of certain reconstructions of Proto-Korean-Japanese." Papers in Japanese Linguistics 2.1:31-47.

MILLER, ROY A, 1967. The Japanese Language. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

ONO SUSUMU. 1957. Jodai kanazukai no kenkyu. Iwanami, Tokyo.

ONO TORUo 1962. Man'yogana no kenkyu. Meiji Shoin, Tokyo.

REISCHAUER, EDWIN 0, and JOHN K. FAIRBANK. 1960. East Asia: The Great Tradition. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.

SAKAKURA ATSUYOSHI. 1966. Gokosei no kenkyu. Kadokawa Shoten, Tokyo.

UNGER, J. MARSHALL. 1971. "A note on Old Japanese verb inflection." Papers from the 7th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 553-568.

1973. Review of Roy A, Miller, Japanese and the Other Altaic Languages. Papers in Japanese Linguistics 2.1:155- 169.

WENCK, GUNTHER. 1954-57. Japanische Phonetik, Vols. I-IV. Otto Harrassowitz, Weisbaden.

YOKOYAMA, MASAKO. 1950. "The inflections of 8th century Japanese." Supplement to Language 26.3.

YOSHITAKE, SABURO, 1934. The Phonetics of Eighth Century Japanese. Royal Asiatic Society, London.



Documents

The Phonology of Eighth-Century Japaneseby Roland A. Lange