In a series of lectures published in the comments section to the previous 2 posts, I discovered and detailed the Yeniseian origins of the Japonic language family. That's not to say that Japanese is a Yeniseian language, but that the Wa people used to speak a Yeniseian language, and they carried over many of their lexical items into the Altaic language that they shifted to after Yeniseian -- probably a Para-Mongolic language -- and have retained them even into the Japonic stage of their history, after incorporating Emishi / Ainu speakers along the way.
But the numerous examples I gave are mostly nouns and adjectives, and some highly important closed-class items like pronouns, kin terms, and particles / affixes. There are very few verbs in the examples -- until now!
The reason I couldn't draw Yeniseian origins for Japanese verbs is that I was trying to capture too many segments from the Japonic form, but it turns out that the final 2 segments in Japonic verbs -- Cu (some consonant, and "u") -- are just verb markers, not part of the semantic core of the word. I knew that already about the final "u" for Japanese verbs, but I did not appreciate the fact that the final consonant is not semantically crucial, it's only there for phonotactic reasons.
And that reason I didn't know that, is that nobody else knows that! So I couldn't just read about it in a Wikipedia article, Wiktionary entry, or even scholarly article, unless it's an obscure / forgotten one, entirely in Japanese, from the 15th C...
So in the interest of not only revealing the nature of Japanese verbs, but also to help connect them back to earlier Yeniseian forms that have been carried over after language shift, I'm going to start a new post on this topic.
The source of Proto-Japonic verbs is Wiktionary's list. See also some helpful intros from Wikipedia on the topic of Japanese conjugation and Japanese five-way vs. one-way verbs ("godan" vs. "ichidan").
First, to briefly summarize what *is* already known about Japanese verbs. They characteristically end in "u", not some other vowel, and not a consonant (coda consonants are banned in P-J). Other parts of speech are not this regularized in their ending, Japonic really wanted to clearly mark its verbs.
Before this final "u" is a consonant. Verbs fall into 2 classes. By far the most common are those where this consonant is considered the final segment of the stem of the verb. Less common are those where this consonant is "r", but the verb stem is considered to end in the vowel just before that, always followed by "ru". These classes are called consonant-stem verbs vs. vowel-stem verbs.
Example of a consonant-stem verb -- "kaku" ("to write"), has the stem "kak-".
Example of a vowel-stem verb -- "miru" ("to see"), has the stem "mi-".
The consonant-stem verbs are also known as "godan" or 5-way verbs, since the vowel that follows the stem comes in all 5 different Modern Japanese vowels, depending on the tense, aspect, etc. that the verb is being used it. So "kak-" is followed by "a", "i", "u", "e", and "o", before other suffixes and particles are added on, to indicate whether it's a negative, a command, the infinitive, the past, and so on.
The vowel-stem verbs are also known as "ichidan" or 1-way verbs, since their stems end in a vowel, and this is the one and only vowel in their conjugation pattern (before the negative, command, infinitive, etc. suffixes are added onto them).
Since the vowel-stem verbs have stems that end in a vowel, and the unconjugated verb must end in a vowel as well, and Japonic phonotactics prefer syllables that are "CV", a consonant must come between the end of the stem and the final "u". In every single case, this consonant is "r" -- showing that it is a dummy consonant, not semantically crucial to the particular verb it occurs in. For example, "miru" and "tomeru", whose stems are "mi-" and "tome-".
Now, for the part that is not understood, or if it was once understood, has not been transmitted to the present. This preference for verbs ending in "ru" is not unique to the vowel-stem verbs, where it is obligatory -- the most common final consonant for the consonant-stem verbs is "r", which means they also end in "ru"!
Can any ol' consonant be the final segment of a stem for the consonant-stem verbs? I skimmed through the list of P-J verbs and could immediately see that "r" was the most common, followed by "k", with others rare, and some non-existent. How is this not widely known??? There's a massive preference for and against certain segments as the final consonant of consonant-stem verbs.
I present these in the following list of 61 consonant-stem verbs and 16 vowel-stem verbs, which are the entire list of P-J verbs at Wiktionary. First they're split into the consonant (godan) vs. vowel (ichidan) stem verbs. And within them, they're ordered by the frequency of the final segment, from common to absent. Wiktionary lists "woi-" as "wo-", but it has an "i" in some forms, so it's like the others ending in a vowel sequence of "Vi". The vowel "ə" is AKA "o2".
Godan
R, 21
ar-
asar-
kir-
kukOr-
kur-
mapar-
nar-
nenpur-
ninkir-
panpakar-
pikar-
sir-
sur-
ter-
tukur-
tur-
ur-
watar-
wəntər-
yar-
ər-
K, 18
arik-
ik-
isonk-
k-
kak-
kik-
mak-
muk-
nonk-
sik-
suk-
tonk-
tontok-
uk-
unkok-
yak-
ək-
əyənk-
P, 9
ap-
asump-
ip-
kup-
op- ~ əp-
sinənp-
turunp-
tənp-
yukəp-
T, 5
kat-
mat-
mət-
ut-
ət-
S, 4
kərəs-
s-
əs-
ətəs-
M, 2
nəm-
yOnkam-
N, 2
in-
sin-
Y, 0
W, 0
Ichidan
A, 12
pukor-a-
wasur-a-
ank-a-
mak-a-
int-a-
nant-a-
nis-a-
wosam-a-
koy-a-
moy-a-
kuw-a-
uw-a-
I, 4
ai-
mi-
poi-
woi-
E, 0
O, 0
U, 0
Again, all of the vowel-stem verbs end in "ru" in the uninflected form. But the most common final segment for consonant-stem verbs is "r", yielding the ending of "ru" in their uninflected forms as well! This preference for "r" dwarfs nearly all other possible choices for consonants. In a close 2nd place is "k". In a distant 3rd place is "p", and even further behind are "t" and "s", with "m" and "n" rounding out the list of those that are actually present but rare, while "y" and "w" do not appear at all.
So, far from the final consonant of consonant-stem verbs being open to any ol' choice, there is clearly a strong preference for "r" and "k" and against most of the others. Next we investigate why this is, and draw conclusions for the study of etymologies -- very important to know if the final consonant in consonant-stem verbs is semantically crucial or vacuous! Turns out, it's vacuous, and that was what prevented me from discovering Yeniseian origins to Japonic verbs. Thankfully, that can now be corrected!
* * *
So why is "r" the default consonant for the final syllable -- "ru" -- of the uninflected form of Japonic verbs? When the Wa people were shifting from Yeniseian to Altaic / Japonic languages, their morphology changed from polysynthetic to agglutinative, i.e. where you stick or "glue" basic building blocks together in a long chain.
There are only so many building blocks, which introduces the homophone problem -- how can you tell that some suffix is a verb ending vs. a particle connecting two words vs. a noun ending vs. a prefix vs. anything else that a building block could be?
Polysynthetic languages are fusional, where all these changes to a stem are not building blocks concatenated together, but "bound" morphemes that can only appear in certain contexts and not on their own. English has very little of this left, although it is still fusional. A better example are the Romance languages that we studied in school.
In Spanish, the verb "to sing" is "cantar", and the stem is "cant-". Unlike Japanese, though, this stem does not merely receive a series of building blocks stuck on the end, one block for each bit of information added. Rather, the entire rest of the meaning comes from just one ending, which therefore come in dozens of forms.
One of these "bound" endings is "-o", yielding "canto", "I sing". This is the present tense, first person, singular number, indicative mood, simple aspect -- all of those bits of additional information, "fused" into a single morpheme that cannot appear on its own, but only on a verb stem. If you want "We sing", the ending is "-amos", yielding "cantamos". There is no clear relation between "-o" and "-amos" -- opacity is a feature of fusional morphology, whereas agglutinative morphology is transparent, since each bit of meaning has its own building block. That's not even to mention the dozens of other endings that "cant-" can receive, to fill out all those differences in tense, person, number, mood, and aspect!
Well, although agglutinative morphology is far more transparent than the opacity of fusional morphology, that comes at a trade-off with the homophone problem. In Spanish, there are almost no homophone problems across the dozens of endings that "cant-" can take, and none of them are homophones with other words throughout the language -- "amos", "aste", "arian", etc., are not free-standing words that could be confused with these fusional verb endings.
This makes the detection of word boundaries crystal-clear for fusional languages -- "Oh, I just heard '-aste', which can only be a verb ending, so that's the end of a word. And it followed 'cant-', which is a verb stem, so that must be the beginning of the word."
Agglutinative languages like Japanese have a huge potential homophone problem, since building blocks can hypothetically be combined in any which way, so how do you know which meaning is intended? Is "mi" the stem of a vowel-stem verb, is "mi" a noun", is "mi" a particle, is "mi" a suffix, or prefix, or pronoun? It could be any of those things, and in fact in Japanese it *is* several of those things.
Agglutinative languages also have the problem of detecting word boundaries, since the building blocks can appear in initial, medial, and final position, hypothetically. They aren't like "aron" in Spanish, which is a fusional verb ending that cannot appear as a prefix or as a stem of a noun or verb. Unlike hearing "aron" in Spanish and immediately knowing it's the end of a word, hearing "mi" in Japanese gives you zero information about whether it's the beginning, middle, or end of a word, since that building block can appear in all places!
Therefore, agglutinative languages have to try to impose a set of rules about which building blocks can appear at the beginning, middle, or end, and for verbs vs. nouns vs. adjectives. It mitigates some of the confusion about homophones and word boundaries, but doesn't entirely solve it.
How can they do this, if their whole morphology is about gluing together any ol' string of building blocks? Well, that's just the semantic side, where "mi" could refer to various things.
* * *
Enter, phonotactics! That is, the rules or constraints on what sounds, sound sequences, sound structures, etc., words can take in the language.
Getting right to the point, Japonic phonotactics prohibit "r" in initial position. It only occurs initially in words borrowed from Chinese, English, or other non-Japonic language. So it works perfectly to indicate medial or final position, eliminating initial position. When you hear "ru", you know it's the middle or end of a word. Again, doesn't totally solve the problem, but it helps.
That also means that "rV" cannot be a particle, since that would mean "r" in word-initial position. Japanese has tons of connecting particles, but none of them begin with "r". So when you hear "ru", you know it's not a particle, not a prefix or beginning of a stem, so it's either a suffix or a later part of a stem.
Why did the vowel have to be "u"? To avoid homophone problems, it seems: "ra" was already taken as a pluralizing noun suffix, "re" was already taken as a nominalizing suffix, and "ri" for and adverbial suffix. "Ro" seems to have been dispreferred on phonotactic grounds, it's by far the least common "r" syllable in OJ. So that leaves "ru" (3rd-most common "r" syllable in OJ) as the best choice for default verb ending.
From "ru", the default vowel ending for verbs became "u", even for verbs whose final syllable has some other consonant, like "kak-". In OJ, the most common syllable for a consonant does not always end in "u", e.g. "p" and "t". So it's not consonant-by-consonant phonotactics that determines the final vowel of the verb -- it's a default vowel that was originally established for "r", and it was copied for all other verbs in order to standardize the final segment of verbs -- "u".
Why didn't nouns and adjectives receive such rigidly standardized endings? Cuz they don't add on as many building blocks as verbs do in Japanese. Nouns are not inflected for number (mostly) or gender. They only take case suffixes. Adjectives do not have to agree with the nouns they modify, for number, gender, or case. Since verbs are going to take on all sorts of suffixes, it's more necessary to know where the end of the stem is, that all these blocks are being stacked on top of.
Which consonants other than "r" are allowed for consonant-stem verbs? This is both phonotactics and avoiding homophones, especially with suffixes and particles. And this is the only place where the 5-way conjugation of verbs is relevant -- since many vowels are going to follow the final consonant of the stem, this presents phonotactic and homophone problems for that consonant plus any of the vowels. That's a lot of problems to avoid, and only a few consonants can do so.
Starting with the consonants that are absent from consonant-stem verbs -- the approximants "y" and "w". From the P-J stage, the syllables "wu" and "yi" were banned in order to dissimilate approximants from their vocalic counterparts. Since both "i" and "u" would appear after "y" and "w" in the 5-way conjugation pattern, this would result in the syllables "yi" and "wu" appearing, and that's illegal. So, no consonant-stem verbs can end in "y" or "w". In fact, if they were intended to be the final consonant of a consonant-stem verb, they were given an invariant "a" afterward, and put into the 1-way / vowel-stem class instead. We'll get to those later.
The nasals "m" and "n" would not result in illegal syllables when conjugated, but they would involve too big of a homophone problem. "N" plus any vowel is already a highly common suffix or particle, especially the possessive particles "no" / "na" and the locative particle "ni", as well as the diminuitive noun suffix "ne". "M" would yield a bunch of homophones for common concepts like "seeing", "body", and "three", as well as the non-unique topic marker particle "mo", and "mu" was already a verb suffix (volitional, etc.).
Originally, "o" was not one of the vowels following the last consonant of the stem, so these homophones aren't so crucial, but they indicate the homophone problem nonetheless, which "r" does not have.
The problem with "s" is that "su" is already a verb unto itself, one of the very few that is monosyllabic, and a very ancient and common verb -- "to become" and "to do". Hearing this at the end of some other verb whose consonant stem ended in "s" would make it sound like the final "su" was this standalone verb being used as the 2nd element of a compound verb, or as an auxilliary verb for the part of the stem preceding "s". WAY too confusing. Evidently so confusing that over time, Japanese standardized "su" into "suru" with the most preferred verb ending, "ru", just to prevent any confusion.
I'll get to the handful of exceptions to these rare consonant verbs, in a bit, but briefly they seem to be compounds where the rare consonant was not originally the end of a stem, but the start of the 2nd element of a compound. So they're not such exceptions anyway.
"T" would yield "tu", which was already a common particle (genitive), as well as a verb suffix (completion), and a counter suffix for nouns. "To" was already taken by connecting word "and".
"P" would yield "pu", which was already a verb suffix (ongoing, repeating). Worst of all, "pa" was the topic marking particle.
That leaves only "k" as able to compete with "r". The only particle it would yield a homophone of is "ka", but that's a sentence-final particle, not one that connects words, so it's no problem for the end of a verb. However, "ka" was an adjective suffix in OJ. "Ki" as a certainty suffix for verbs came later during Classical Japanese, not in P-J or OJ. And "ku" was a not-so-common nominal suffix in OJ, but was also a standalone common verb in P-J, "to come", later standardized into "kuru". Same problem with "ku" as with "su".
"K" is not as flawless as "r", but a quantum leap above the other consonants, so "k" is more for the overflow, after a stem ending in "r" has already been taken -- the rest of the stem is fine, just alter "r" to "k", and presto, a new verb with no homophone problems.
E.g., since "sir-" and "sur-" already exist, "sik-" and "suk-" can be used instead. The "su" in "sur-" has to do with "rubbing", while the "su" in "suk-" has to do with "liking, loving". The "si" in "sir-" has to do with "knowing", while the "si" in "sik-" has to do with "spreading out". Rather than conflate the unrelated "su"s and "si"s into homophonous "suru"s and "siru"s, use the default "r" for one and the over-flow "k" for the other. Bingo.
* * *
Before exploring this matter of the less common consonants being an over-flow when the more common consonants were already taken, let's address the matter of how many of these verbs are morphologically atomic vs. complex.
Well, any time there's a nasal + obstruent, it just means there's a morpheme boundary, and this will later get rendaku-fied in OJ. Rarely is there any evidence for the nasal.
Also, Japanese morphemes in general and verbs especially want to be bisyllabic / bimoraic, or perhaps monosyllabic / monomoraic, not more than 2 syllables / moras. Atomic verbs could be hiding inside verbs of 3+ syllables, though, while not being attested on their own. So I'm inclined to only count 4 verbs under stem ending in "p" -- those whose infinitive is 1 or 2 moras ("apu", "ipu", "əpu", "kupu"). The others are complex, and the "p" is really an initial or medial consonant to a later element of a compound, not the final consonant of an atomic stem.
Then restricting the analysis to atomic verb stems, the idea that less common consonants are an over-flow for already taken more-common consonants, predicts that the less common verbs should have more common counterparts -- the ones they are trying to avoid homophony with, by using a less common over-flow consonant. This excludes monosyllabic verbs, since their sole consonant is not a dummy consonant, and you can't tell whether or not there's a competing form -- what precedes this consonant is nothing, not a sequence of vowels and consonants.
Let's see...
Of 10 "k" verbs, 6 have higher-ranking counterparts ("kik-", "sik-", "suk-", "uk-", "yak-", "ək-"). Also, "kak-" may have a counterpart hiding inside of either "panpakar-" or "pikar-".
Of 4 "p" verbs, all have higher-ranking counterparts, and 1 has both of them! ("əp-")
Of 5 "t" verbs, 4 have higher-ranking counterparts, some with more than one.
Of 1 "s" verb, it indeed has every higher-ranking counterpart ("əs-").
Of 1 "m" verb, it does not have any higher-ranking counterparts. This is "nəm-" meaning "to drink", and perhaps it was allowed its very rare final nasal in the stem, as part of onomatopoeia, where eating and drinking tend to have nasal consonants -- both consonants are nasal here, in fact, just like "nom-nom" in English.
Of 2 "n" verbs, both have multiple higher-ranking counterparts.
So yes, the less common consonants are over-flow choices, for when the better choices are already taken, and homophony must be avoided.
And in all cases, to reiterate the main point, these final consonants in the stem are NOT semantically crucial, they are vacuous and only chosen on the basis of phonotactics and avoiding homophony. Important to bear in mind when trying to find earlier ancestors of these verbs...
* * *
What about the 1-way / vowel-stem verbs? Here again we see them acting as either over-flow for already taken forms, or to avoid phonotactic prohibitions.
By far the most common vowel-stem verbs end in "a", and they are transcribed as "-a-", to hint that the "a" is just a dummy consonant. If it weren't, then the other consonants could show up as well -- but they don't. Only "i" shows up as well, and it's rare, and most of those involve vowel sequences, not consonant + "i".
This "a" seems to have been "hard-coded" to prevent the 5-way (or earlier, 4-way) vowel pattern from spawning. Every conjugated form will have "a".
Well, that avoids the ban on approximants "y" and "w" -- both of those are fine followed by "a". Indeed, unlike the consonant-stem class, where "y" and "w" are totally absent, they make up 4 of the 12 entries for vowel-stem ending in "a", just before the dummy "a". Since they couldn't end in "y" or "w" when illegal vowels could result under the 5-way / 4-way pattern, just hard-code the following vowel to be "a", and problem solved!
I'm inclined to think that means these approximants *are* semantically meaningful, since they went through the extreme measure of hard-coding a dummy vowel afterward, to allow the approximant to be preserved. If it were just an over-flow choice of consonant, there are better choices -- the nasals, the sibilant, or "t" or "p", which were generally not chosen. They really wanted the "y" and "w" to stay in these cases.
That goes for the other 2nd-to-last consonants in the vowel-stem class -- which means there's a sick inversion going on! The final consonants in the consonant-stem class are vacuous, while the latest-occurring consonants in the vowel-stem class are meaningful! The 5-way class is really "consonant stem for phonetics, but the preceding vowel for semantics", and the 1-way class is really "vowel stem for phonetics, but the preceding consonant for semantics". Neat.
Another 4 of the 12 vowel-stem verbs are from consonants that are rare in the consonant-stem class (2 "t"s, 1 "s", 1 "m").
Only 2 of 12 vowel-stem verbs are from the super-common "r" in the consonant-stem class, and another mere 2 of 12 from the super-common "k" in the consonant-stem class. In the vowel-stem class, "r" and "k" are not so dominant at all -- combined, they are as common as "y" and "w", which are totally absent in the consonant-stem class!
The over-flow pattern shows up here again. The atomic "kor" in "pukor-a-" could be hiding in "kukOr-" from the consonant-stem class. The atomic "sur" in "wasur-a-" already appears in "sur-". The atomic "mak" in "mak-a-" already appears in "mak-".
As for the vowel-stem verbs ending in "i", 3 of them involve vowel sequences, which are generally a feature of P-J nouns, not verbs. E.g., "tai" = "hand", whose forms have an "a" sometimes and an "e" other times. And the 1 vowel-stem verb that does not have a vowel sequence, "mi-", is cognate with a P-J noun that does have a vowel sequence, "mai" = "eye". Perhaps "miru" began as "mairu", which would make it fit better with the other "i" vowel-stem verbs, and for whatever reason the "a" was deleted.
None of these 4 would have a homophone in the consonant-stem class if they had an "r" hard-coded after their vowel stem, e.g. "ai-" could be altered to "air-" and not compete with an existing consonant-stem verb of that form. Ditto for the others.
Here it seems more like phonotactics play a role -- atomic stems / infinitive verbs cannot be more than 2 moras. "Airu", "poiru", and "woiru" all have 3 moras, so they can't be hard-coded into "r"-ending consonant-stem verbs. In fact, their descendant or variant forms will not have 3 moras either -- "eru", "hiru", and "oru / iru".
Again that suggests that "mi-" used to be "mai". Otherwise it's unusual, since its infinitive, "miru", has only 2 moras as is desired -- that should result in it being treated as a consonant-stem verb ending in "r", "mir-". But if it was originally "mai-", then "mairu" would have 3 moras, break the rule, and get lumped into the "i"-ending vowel-stem verbs, along with "ai-", "poi-", and "woi-".
* * *
I'll get to etymologies in a separate post, or perhaps in the comment section to this post. The most important thing before that is laying out this foundation, about what segments are semantically meaningful vs. vacuous. It turns out, a lot of those consonants are meaningless, so they don't need to be captured in an etymology, only the first "CV" syllable.
Sadly, that makes the etymologies less convincing, since a 3-segment etymology is more convincing than a 2-segment one. But that's just the way the cookie crumbles with Japonic historical linguistics...
Aside from showing a number of Yeniseian origins for Japonic verbs, I'll also draw a parallel between the phonotactic structure of their verbs, and how it parallels Japonic.
Briefly, none of the Proto-Yeniseian verbs -- hardly any words at all -- begin with a nasal. Yeniseian is polysynthetic and prefixing, while Japonic is agglutinative and suffixing -- so it's the same process. Yeniseian verbs avoid initial nasals, Japonic verbs avoid final nasals (in the stem). Japonic is rife with suffixes and particles beginning with nasals, while Yeniseian has several prefixes for verbs that begin with a nasal.
So they share this avoidance of nasals in the part of the verb that gets the most modification during conjugation. And since those particles are carry-overs from Yeniseian to Japonic, as I showed earlier, this is not a coincidence across language families. Yeniseian verbs avoid initial nasals in their stem, and Japonic as the end of their stem, for cognate reasons.
I've also discovered another sound correspondence between Proto-Yeniseian and Proto-Japonic, but I'll get to that one later as well. But briefly, P-Y "tɬ" corresponds to P-J "p", at least in initial position. Not very phonetically expected or motivated -- why not alter "tɬ" to simply "t" or "s" or even "r"? -- but it is what it is.
Well, let me end with at least one etymology! P-Y "cej" means "to rip". P-J lacks "c", but can shift its location to velar "k", as I showed in previous examples. The coda consonant is not allowed, and turns into its vocalic counterpart "i". Since vowel sequences are not preferred, and the 2nd usually takes over the 1st, that gives "ki" as the stem.
Whaddaya know? "Kir-" in P-J means "to cut"! Infinitive: "kiru". And that final "r" in the stem is semantically vacuous, it's only there to make verbs adhere to the standard of "ru" being the final syllable. That means only "ki-" is meaningful in Japonic -- and perfectly matches the expected form that would derive from P-Y "cej". QED!
Another sign that consonant-stem verbs don't want to end in nasals, is that the only 2 ending in "n", "in-" and "sin-", in fact have hybrid conjugations in OJ. Two of their conjugated forms (adnominal, exclamatory) look like vowel-stem verbs.
ReplyDeleteProto-Japonic passive verb suffix looks like the famous Proto-Na-Dene detransitivizing prefix, which also gives the passive forms of verbs.
ReplyDeleteP-ND form is "də-"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Na-Dene/d%C9%99-
Japonic is suffixing rather than prefixing, so it goes on the end. Since P-J does not have voiced obstruents, "d" is out -- but "r" is in.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/-(a)r-
In fact, in OJ there was alternation between "re" and "ye" for the passive suffix, suggesting that they were two attempts to render the same unpronounceable segment from some other source.
Well, "d" could be devoiced into "t" for Japonic, but pretty soon everything merges into "t". Why not alter some things into "r" or "y"?
Like "d", both "r" and "y" are voiced, in the alveolar / palatal-ish place, and "r" is pretty stop-like -- a tap / flap.
Vajda relates P-ND "də-" to Proto-Yeniseian "ɟe-", which is an imperative prefix, not about passivity exactly. However, also in OJ there was alternation between "ro" and "yo" for the imperative verb suffix. And "ɟ" is a voiced palatal stop, so "r" and to a lesser extent "y" could be attempts to render that in Japonic as best they could. The "r" is voiced, stop-ish, and near palatal (coronal), while "y" is voiced, not very stop-ish, but in the palatal place.
So these two seemingly unrelated OJ pairs of alternating "r" / "y" affixes -- one pair for the passive, one pair for the imperative -- could be the missing link between Yeniseian and the Na-Dene "d-" classifier. They're all trying to get at a similar sound, for similar meanings. Japonic has both of these meanings, imperative and passive, while Yeniseian only has the imperative, and Na-Dene only has the passive.
Glorious Nippon, Nowa-san no Aaku, for so many things -- not just American culture, but prehistoric Northeast Asian language links as well! ^_^
On Japanese mythology, religion, and sacred language purging, and returning to one of the obviously compound verbs in the consonant-stem list -- "yOnkam-", meaning "to bend". In the previous post's comments, I showed a Yeniseian origin of the Japonic word for "bow", the weapon, which is "qewǰ" in P-Y and "yu" in P-J in stem form, although "yu + mi" where "mi" means "body, main part of an object". An example of the P-Y (and P-Athabaskan) "q" and P-J "y" correspondence (at least initially).
ReplyDeleteWell, since there's no evidence for a nasal in "yOnkam", it's really a compound, and later rendaku applied at the word boundary when the compound was lexicalized. It can't be a coincidence that "to bend" has a stem that means "bow", the weapon. The "O" means either "o" or "u", and it's "u" in all attested forms.
So the P-J word for "to bend" was really "yu + kamu" in the dictionary form. The verb "kamu" is not attested on its own in P-J -- but we can tell that it means "to take the shape of", since compounding it with the word for "bow" yields "to bend".
It would be one of the very rare exceptions to the consonant-stem preference, since "kam-" ends in a nasal, a big no-no. But it's a rare exception.
It's not a vowel-stem verb, since "yOnkam-" has an "i" as well as a "u" following the "m" in conjugated form.
I think this verb "kamu" / "kami" is behind the Proto-Japonic word for "god, spirit, animist presence", "kamui", which also has an alternation between final "u" and "i":
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/kamui
It's the "kamu" form of this otherwise unattested verb, plus the emphatic subject marker "-i".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%84#Etymology_3
So, it means "the one who takes shape", "the shape-taker", etc. -- the first entities to take definitive shape, back when the universe was just a void or uniformly featureless and formless matter. Organized entities, not just random chaos.
As the animist / Shinto religion became more and more organized, from a folk religion into an institutionalized one with priests and shrine maidens and so on, the word "kami" took on a sacred tone, not just a descriptive tone of "primeval entity that has been here before us, and will be here after us". All sorts of animist religions have words for "spirits".
But turn it into a priestly religion, and suddenly you can't talk about them in mundane or everyday terms. Or -- if your term for them came from mundane origins, those mundane usages must be swept away.
I think that's exactly what happened, and why "kamu" meaning "to take shape" is not otherwise attested. It is hiding out inside a compound term that has lexicalized into a single verb, and even then, its initial consonant has been subtly altered by rendaku -- "yugamu" -- making it even harder to spot by the crusade to wipe it out in non-sacred contexts. Word purges can easily fail to find their targets when they're inside a compound.
When it was understood that "kami" meant "the one who takes shape", you could no longer use the verb "kamu" = "to take shape" in a mundane context.
So instead, a more roundabout compound was invented, to avoid the taboo of "kamu". It is "katachizukuru", which comes from Japonic words meaning "shape" and "to build / make", much like the compound phrase "to take shape" in English.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%BD%A2%E4%BD%9C%E3%82%8B#Japanese
But originally, the Wa people had a morphologically simple word for "to take shape" -- "kamu" -- before the concept of "taking shape" took on a sacred tone, with the rise of a priestly religion centered around the kami.
Neat. ^_^
Addendum: it's not unexpected for "kamu" to have a nasal at the end of its consonant-stem, since higher-ranking choices for that final consonant are already taken in P-J -- "kak-" and "kat", meaning only lower-ranking choices were available. That leaves only "s", "m", or "n". The "s" verbs are about as common as the "t" verbs, so they had to go noticeably down further -- to the nasals, where they flipped a coin between "m" and "n".
ReplyDeleteThis may also explain why it was lost -- not only the purge of suddenly sacred words that used to be for mundane contexts, but it's from an unstable verb class, consonant stems ending in "m". Words ending in "mu" just don't sound like good ol' Japonic verbs, so all the more reason to get rid of "kamu" and replace it with "katchizukuru", whose verb *does* end in "ru" like Japonic really wants verbs to end.
There are other possible reasons why the Japonic word for "spirit, god" originally meant "the one who takes shape". It's not necessarily the very first series of gods who ever existed in the history of the universe, emerging from primordial chaos.
ReplyDeleteThe kami are all over the natural world, and are here in the present time. Not just creator gods from long ago.
So perhaps it's setting up an opposition between entities that are spiritual, ethereal, intangible -- vs. entities that are material, corporeal, etc. Spirits vs. bodies.
A body is made from solid concrete matter, whereas a spirit is more abstract -- like a "shape" or "form".
It could also refer to the animist belief that natural objects were inhabited by spirits, like a mountain or a river. In that case, the spirit "takes the shape of" the mountain, or "takes the shape of" the river. The spirits are not solid, concrete, and definite -- they're protean, shape-shifting, and can take the shape of various natural objects, which they then inhabit and become the ruler over it.
So, a term like "yama no kami" = "mountain god" may have originally meant "the one who takes the shape of a mountain", i.e. an entity that was once abstract and protean, but then took up residence in the mountain, took its shape, and became bound to it as its spiritual over-seer.
This would have the same meaning in Japanese as "yama no katachi zukuri" -- "yama no katachi" = "the shape of a mountain", and "tsukuru" = "to build / make", and the suffix "-i" meaning "the one who does the verb it's attached to". "The one who takes the shape of a mountain".
That means "kamu" and "katachizukuru" are synonyms -- "to take the shape of".
Left out 1 verb, though it doesn't change the results. Wiktionary mis-tagged it as a noun, so it didn't show up in the list of verbs.
ReplyDeleteIt's "ki-" ("to put on clothes"), a vowel-stem verb ending in "i" -- and so, the dictionary form ending in "ru", "kiru".
It's like "miru" in that way -- and therefore, probably like "miru" in other ways. Like it was probably "kairu", to fit with the rest of the "i"-ending vowel-stem verbs -- "CVV" then "ru".
Also like "mi" = "to see", which is related to vowel-alternating forms "ma, me" = "eye" (from P-J "mai"), "ki" = "to put on clothes" must be related to P-J "kai", which comes in vowel-alternating pairs "ka, ke" = "animal fur", i.e. the outer layer of "clothing" that non-human animals wear.
I think the direction of extension is from the human term to the animal term, as in English -- the animal's fur is called a "coat", which was first used to refer to human clothing, then extended to animal fur.
Similarities in Yeniseian and Japonic morpheme's phonological shape. I mean garden-variety words, not affixes or particles, not small closed-class words like pronouns. The typical noun or verb. Not compounds, morphologically simple words.
ReplyDeleteYeniseian wants these words to come in the form CV(G)C -- two consonants that bookend the word, a nuclear vowel between them, and an optional glide "w" or "y" ("j") in the coda before the bookend consonant.
Japonic makes one little change -- banning coda consonants -- but after that, it's the same. Two book-ending consonants with a crucial vowel between them, only now adding a dummy vowel at the end -- CVCV. The optional glide is not possible, and if it were there and the word is being carried over into Japonic, it'll have to turn into a vocal counterpart first ("w" -> "u" or maybe "o", and "y" -> "i"), then one of the two vowels in the resulting sequence must remain and the other get deleted, or maybe they fuse into some single 3rd vowel.
Verbs show this template the best, since the final vowel must be "u", and is therefore a dummy vowel signalling its part of speech. The variable part is just CVC-, for both consonant-stem verbs and the dictionary form of vowel-stem verbs, like "miru".
Even for nouns, where the 2nd V can vary, it often seems like a dummy vowel chosen on the basis of phonotactics (frequency of occurence with the preceding C), or avoiding homophony.
Morphemes (aside from a few pronouns etc) are not bare vowels. And bare vowels can only occupy an entire syllable in word-initial position -- and even then, this is a not a common way to begin a word, overwhelmingly they begin with consonants. Both Yeniseian and Japonic.
Japonic is a bit more lenient about word-initial vowels, but they're still not common -- and some of them may not have the proper reconstruction, as they may have had a consonant that has since been deleted, as in the illegal syllables "wu" becoming "u" and "yi" becoming "i". Some of the P-J words beginning with "u" really used to begin with "wu" before the ban on it solidified, likewise for words beginning with "i" really beginning with "yi" once upon a time.
There doesn't seem to be any counterpart that would require subtracting words that begin with consonants -- Japonic does not insert an initial consonant before a bare vowel. So the words that begin with consonants, have always begun with consonants. Unlike the vowel-initial words.
For both Yeniseian and Japonic, the 2nd consonant is often a semantically vacuous segment tacked onto a semantically coherent core CV. Not to say that the first CV is crystal-clear -- but at least defined by some semantic field like "body part" or "kin term" or "weather" etc.
ReplyDeleteYeniseian researchers have already noticed this about its morphology, like "pub" = "son" and "pun" = "daughter", suggesting a common base of "pu" = "child kin term". Then "pub" breaks down into "pu + b" and "pun" into "pu + n". The "b" and "n" are not semantically meaningful in themselves, they don't appear across the language, so they're not a meaning-bearing unit. They just distinguish the various members of a class that shares the initial "CV(G)" segments.
So really they're like subscripts, or as we say in English "child kin term 1," "child kin term 2", "child kin term 3", and so on. The words "1", "2", and "3" are no more meaningful in this context than final "b" and "n" are in the Yeniseian child kin terms. It's not compositional semantics, it's just giving an arbitrary subscript or index to the various members of a class that share some hazy semantic field like kin term, weather, body part, etc.
As I've shown in previous etymologies of Japonic words that come from Yeniseian origins, these semantically vacuous subscript consonants are not always carried over into Japonic -- only the meaningful core of "CV" (where an optional glide has vocalized and replaced or been replaced by the original nuclear vowel).
I think this is going on big-time with Yeniseian verbs carrying over into Japonic. And just look at that list of consonant-stem verbs in Japonic -- there's no way the 2nd C is meaningful, if it overwhelmingly wants to be "r", or perhaps "k", and is resistant to "p" or "t" or "s", barely tolerates "m" or "n", and rejects "y" and "w". It is clearly chosen based on some phonotactic concern, standardizing the verb's sound paradigm, and avoiding homophony.
That's why Japonic did not carry over the often semantically vacuous 2nd C in a word -- they knew it was meaningless, and they could use the same strategy in Japonic to come up with a new vacuous 2nd C, but one that would obey Japonic phonotactics and phoneme inventory. Yeniseian has lots of verbs ending in "n", but that's a huge problem for Japonic, so almost none of their verbs have "n" as the 2nd C. They'll come up with a new vacuous consonant, and it seems "r" was it, and "k" was the first over-flow choice after "r".
So, in the same way that Yeniseian "pub" breaks down into "pu + b" = "child kin term + vacuous index segment", so does Japonic "kiru" ("to cut") break down into "ki + r + u" = "root meaning cut + vacuous index segment + verb-typical final vowel". That root "ki" was inherited from Yeniseian, where "cej" = "to rip".
Does Yeniseian "n" correspond to Japonic "r"? It's striking that there aren't many bans on what consonants can occur in which position in either language family -- but they both have one very strong ban on one consonant, and in initial position. Yeniseian bans nasals initially, while Japonic bans liquids initially.
ReplyDeleteAt the end of a word -- or a verb, anyway, and considering the 2nd C to be the end of the verb stem in Japonic -- Yeniseian is happy with nasals but not liquids or retroflexes. Japonic is happy with liquids as the 2nd C, but not nasals (for verbs at least, possibly nouns as well for the same reason -- they don't want the 2nd syllable of a 2-syllable noun to sound like a particle, and several highly frequent particles begin with "n").
I'll have to investigate this further by seeing if there are plausible carry-over candidates, where P-Y "n" corresponds to P-J "r". Just throwing it out there for now as something noticeable about the two families.
More on Japonic having words that begin with a vowel, but used to begin with "w" or "y" way back when, and its flip-side. The main point is that this strengthens the case for Japonic morphemes being of the shape CVCV -- since some of those that are VCV used to have a C before them, but it dropped out due to an early ban on it before the V in question.
ReplyDeleteWell, what about another apparent violation of CVCV -- CV? Perhaps these words, too, used to have another C that has disappeared, only at the end rather than beginning. And not due to incompatibility with a following V, but due to a ban on coda consonants, becoming a vowel instead, and the "one vowel per syllable" rule.
E.g., P-Y "cej" has shape CVC. Japonic turns coda glides into vocalic counterparts, yielding a shape of CVV. Then it bans vowel sequences, so regardless of how that's resolved, the final shape is CV.
But if you look back into such a word's deep ancient pre-history, you might find a consonant there after all -- a coda glide from Yeniseian! The exact same consonants that disappeared in initial position, although they disappeared for different reasons. But still, more "y"s and "w"s than you might think at first glance, as both 1st C and 2nd C in Japonic.
They are clearly reconstructed in these positions for Yeniseian, cuz Yeniseian doesn't ban coda consonants, and doesn't have the glide-vowel dissimilation going on, as Japonic does.
Why don't Japonic verbs begin with "p" or "w"? I looked at the endings of verbs (really the 2nd C), but what about the 1st C? Again, looking at atomic verbs, not compound or complex ones.
ReplyDeleteP-J verbs are happy to begin with "k", "m", "n", "s", "t", and "y".
There are only 2 consonants that they appear unhappy with. One is "w" (there's only "woi-"), but I think that may reflect the overall weakness of "w" in Japonic as a whole -- not just verbs, not just in initial position. "W" has been on a long-term decline ever since the beginning. I'll get to the implications of that later, but briefly it means that some P-J verbs that begin with a vowel actually used to begin with "w", but this weakest of consonants has disappeared -- yes, even at the P-J stage.
The second and really strange one is "p" (there's only "poi-"). There's a parallel between "w" and "p" for beginning verbs -- their only example is followed by "oi-". That makes them vowel-stem verbs, which are rare compared to consonant-stem verbs. And it makes then "i"-ending vowel-stem verbs, which are rare compared to "a"-ending vowel-stem verbs.
Another parallel is that both "w" and "p" are labial consonants, although fellow labial consonant "m" is very happy as a verb onset. Still worth noting.
Also like "w", "p" is historically weak in Japonic -- it first weakened to bilabial fricative "f", and from there it weakened further into the whispery puff of "h" (bilabial "f" only remains before "u"). In some cases, like between vowels, it weakened to "w", and like "w" in general it sometimes vanished altogether between vowels.
"M" has occasionally vanished between vowels, or in some cases hardened into "b" (when this voiced obstruent became available). But initially, it has not weakened or been altered or vanished. Sure enough, it is the only labial consonant that is happy as a verb onset in P-J.
Forgot to mention, in case it needs repeating, that "r" is banned in initial position, no matter what part of speech, so of course it's banned as the onset of a verb too.
ReplyDeleteEnter the Yeniseian connection! Recall that the direction of adding affixes is reversed between Yeniseian (polysynthetic, likes prefixes) and Japonic (agglutinative, likes suffixes). So, nasals are rare at the beginning of verbs in Yeniseian, and nasals are rare at the "end" (2nd C) of verbs in Japonic. This is due to avoiding confusion with affixes and particles that begin with nasals, and those affixes and particles are from a shared origin.
ReplyDeleteThere's something similar going on with initial labials being rare in Japonic verbs (only "m" is happy). This would seem to correspond to the final position in Yeniseian.
And indeed, labials are not very happy at the end of Yeniseian verbs. The plain labials are already not so common -- 0 verbs end in "b", 1 in "m", 2 in "w", and 3 in "p".
But the labialized consonants are even rarer -- 0 end in "kʷ", and 1 apiece end in "xʷ", "ŋʷ", and "gʷ" (which comes in two closely related variants, both meaning "to pull" = "bagʷ" or "to pull, to stretch" = "wejgʷ").
This ties back into the first illuminating sound correspondence I discovered between P-Y and P-J -- that the labialized velars in Yeniseian corresponded to plain labial consonants in Japonic, simlar to Q-Celtic and P-Celtic.
I'm at a loss to explain this ban on initial labials in Japonic verbs, and final labial / labialized consonants in Yeniseian verbs.
In Yeniseian, there's a clear explanation for not wanting "ŋʷ" at the end of a verb -- it is also a verb prefix (the perfective), so it would creation confusion about it being the start or end of the verb. And where it's allowed as a coda consonant, it's often part of a suffix for nouns or adjectives -- not verbs. So even if you interpreted it as the final sound, it would confuse you about the part of speech it belonged to.
However, that doesn't explain why the other labial / labialized consonants are unwanted at the end of Yeniseian verbs. They aren't in prefixes to verbs, or suffixes to nouns or adjectives, and would create no confusion.
Although I can't explain the near-ban on labials at the end of Yeniseian verbs, it is still a distinctive fact about the proto-language, and it corresponds to a similar near-ban on labials at the start of Japonic verbs, which I may be unable to explain as well. Still, these distinctions parallel to each other.
There's no reason why "p" should be avoided at the start of Japonic verbs. It's not part of any prefix, so it wouldn't confuse you about whether it was the start or end of the verb.
ReplyDeleteNor could it be interpreted as a noun or adjective that modified the following single-syllable root verb. That is, "pVru" could not be thought of as "pV + ru", for the simple reason that "r" is banned in initial position -- so there cannot be a single-syllable verb "ru", with "pV" modifying it.
And remember, "ru" is by far the desired ending syllable for Japonic verbs. If "pa", "pi", "pu", "pe", or "po" wanted to be followed by a syllalbe to create a verb, it would be "ru". If you heard "paru", you'd have to conclude it was an atomic verb, not a complex one.
Here's where it gets stranger -- there actually are several P-J or OJ words of the form "pVru", which sounds like they should be verbs, but almost none of them are!
"Paru" goes back to OJ and means the season "spring" (noun).
"Piru" goes back to P-J and means "daytime" (noun).
"Puru" in P-J means "ancient, old" (adjective).
"Peru" in P-J means "garlic" (noun).
The sole exception is "poru", which doesn't exist in P-J, but in OJ is a verb meaning "to want, to desire".
So clearly, there was no phonotactic rule against "pVru" -- only a rule against this form being a verb, despite it having the ideal phonetic shape of a verb!
There must have been some deep-seated hatred of verbs beginning with labials, which I think goes back to the Yeniseian hatred of verbs ending with labials. Both language families hate the "closed" side of a verb having a labial.
Again, no functional explanation within either language family -- it's some kind of shibboleth, and it is shared between the two families, suggesting an ancient connection. In this case, Japonic speakers used to be Yeniseian speakers, before migrating out of the Steppe and into the Korean peninsula and Japanese islands.
Cliff-hanger for now: Yeniseian verbs do not begin with a vowel (only one on the list does, and it's complex, with the initial vowel coming from a noun). Yeniseian words in general don't begin with a vowel, but especially not verbs. Only nouns and a few adjectives.
ReplyDeleteP-J verbs also prefer beginning with a consonant rather than vowel, but there are quite a few more exceptions to this rule in Japonic than in Yeniseian (where there are none).
That suggests that, once upon a time, the semantic core of these verbs was not just the bare vowel -- since morphemes in P-J cannot be a bare vowel. Remember, the 2nd syllable in atomic verbs in Japonic is usually not meaningful. So that leaves the 1st syllable to bear the meaning -- and if that 1st syllable is a bare vowel, it cannot be a morpheme, and cannot bear meaning, in Japonic.
Solution: once upon a time, these verbs began with a consonant, and this 1st syllable CV (not just V) was a meaning-bearing unit in Japonic, and presumably in whatever language it ultimately came from.
The obvious places to look are those resulting from the ban on "wu" and "yi", which would turn into "u" and "i" alone as the 1st meaningful syllable, plus a 2nd syllable that meant nothing.
But that is not enough -- there are verbs that begin with "a" and "ə", despite no ban on them after any consonant. Oddly, no P-J verbs begin with "e" or "o1".
So, perhaps they used to begin with consonants that were legal in Japonic, but historically weak -- like "w" or "p".
Or perhaps they used to begin with a Yeniseian consonant that was not pronounceable in Japonic, and there were already too many Yeniseian consonants merged into the small number of Japonic consonants, so they just said "screw it, delete the consonant altogether". That is one technical way to avoid homophony for a CV syllable, just delete the C.
There are no morphemes that are bare vowels in Japonic natively, so there aren't a ton of existing words or morphemes that are the bare vowel -- so it's a small over-flow container for making the transition from Yeniseian to Japonic phoneme inventory while avoiding homophony.
This is a whole 'nother secret passageway to explore, so it'll have to wait until later. Just laying out the logic for now...
All-over Japanese etymology lightning round. First, a Yeniseian one, where P-Y "su" refers to a bird species, hazel grouse. It's a game bird, more like a hen -- not a bird of prey, not a cute little songbird, but one that would be important to hunter-gatherers, as a game bird.
ReplyDeleteThere's a suffix in several P-J and OJ bird names that is also "su", which appears to mean "bird", and the syllables preceding it describe what kind of bird it is, probably by an onomatopoeia for that species. There's P-J "karasu" (crow), OJ "mozu" (shrike), OJ "ugupisu" / MJ "uguisu" (warbler, nightingale), and OJ "potətəgisu" / MJ "hototogisu" (cuckoo).
Perhaps P-Y "su" was generalized to mean "bird", not as a standalone term (that's "təri" in P-J), but as a suffix or classifier. Why not "təri"? This is more like chicken, and especially related to its meat for eating. Crows, shrikes, nightingales, and cuckoos are not livestock for eating. A grouse, although a game bird meant for eating, was not livestock -- and so, would have had a "wild" or "undomesticated" connotation.
Going through the P-Y words for avians, there are various waterfowl names which are not appropriate to crows, cuckoos, etc. that do not spend time in the water. There being so many names for waterfowl (and other water creatures like otters) reflects how central the Yeniseian River and river-life was to the speakers of P-Y.
As a reminder from an earlier discovery here, the Japanese word for "duck" = "kamo" is a P-Y carry-over ("cam" = "goose, northern pintail duck").
P-Y does have an abstract word for "bird", but it's too morphologically complex to carry over into Japonic -- "tɬejVŋʷja", meaning "the winged one". The simplest bird name they had was "su", so that worked best as a suffix in Japonic -- one mora, both "s" and "u" and their combination "su" are totally legal in Japonic, so no problem. And it doesn't refer to waterfowl, making it appropriate for various non-waterfowl bird names in Japonic.
Next, eggplant in Japanese, which I got curious about after watching Watame's BBQ stream with Irys, Bae, and Mori! They started talking about its name in English, and how it has nothing to do with "egg", what the British name for it is, etc. So I decided to look into the Japanese etymology...
ReplyDeleteIn OJ, it's "nasubi", and the existing theories assume that it's from earlier "nasumi", where "mi" = "fruit". I will assume that as well -- eggplant is a fruit, with a whole bunch of seeds inside it, it hangs off of a branch of a tree, etc.
The only confusion is what "nasu" means. The cliff-dwelling sage has the answer!
It's a complex term "na + su", where "na" means "middle, semi-" and "su" means "sour". That is, "nasumi" is a fruit that is semi-sour -- not super-sour, since Japanese eggplants are on the mild and sweet side, but also not sweet like other fruits like apples.
Why not call it "semi-sweet" ("na + ama")? Well, it's on the sour side of the spectrum, not the sweet side. Semi-sweet is sweet -- half-way between neutral and sweet. Semi-sour is half-way between neutral and sour. Eggplants are on the sour side, not the sweet side.
In fact, the P-J word for "pear", "nasi", comes from the same roots, and puts them in the same order. Like the MJ word for eggplant, which is "nasu", the P-J word for pear omits "mi" at the end.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/nasi
The meaning may be slightly different for "nasi" = "pear", which could refer to the interior (or "naka") being more sour than most of the flesh. IDK.
"Naka" meaning "interior" has the extra suffix "ka", referring to a place. So "naka" = "na + ka" or "middle + place". So, "na" can be used as a prefix, without "ka", if it's used to indicate a degree of intensity -- like "semi-" -- rather than to indicate a spatial location, like interior.
The "na" in "nasumi" means "semi-", indicating the degree of sourness, not "interior, inside". So "na" alone is fine, it doesn't need to be "naka".
I'm grateful to Watame and the 3 Japan-residing EN vtubers she hosted, for making me curious about this word's origin in Nihongo! ^_^
Another reason not to call it "semi-sweet" = "na + ama", is that this complex term would contract the two "a" vowels and yield "nama", which means "raw" in P-J -- definitely NOT semi-sweet. xD
ReplyDeletePerhaps that's why pear ("nasi") is called "semi-sour" rather than "semi-sweet", despite being on the sweet side. If P-J wanted to say "semi-sweet", it would come out as "raw" as in uncooked, and that's not what they intended. So, might as well call it semi-sour -- they know it's a sweet fruit, but it's somewhat more sour than other sweet fruits.
ReplyDeleteBack to Yeniseian, and exploring the carry-overs that result in a vowel-initial word in P-J. Japonic phonotactics want a word to begin with a consonant, and no morpheme can be a bare vowel (aside from a few closed-class nouns like personal pronouns).
ReplyDeleteSo in a word of the form VCV, semantically it cannot break down as "V + CV", since the bare vowel "V" cannot bear meaning on its own. It can't be a morpheme.
In the previous post's comments section, I was looking at P-Y and P-Athabaskan "q'" and "q" becoming "y" in Japonic. That is, voiceless uvular stop. There's a voiced counterpart in P-Y, transcribed "ɢ". It's like a hard "g" in English, only made further back, in the uvular place.
Japonic does not have the uvular place. The nearest would be velar, and it would have to be devoiced since P-J didn't have voiced obstruents -- that would make it "k". But that would seem to be the natural choice for "q" instead, and yet "q" became "y". There are also velar and uvular voiceless fricatives in P-Y, which would seem destined for "k" in P-J. Too many consonants trying to merge into "k"!
Especially since "ɢ" is voiced, that's yet another step away from "k", and makes it lower priority than "q" or "x" -- not to mention "c" (palatal voiceless stop), which wants to merge into "k" as well (as we saw, P-Y "cam" -> P-J "kamo").
So perhaps "ɢ" was simply dropped altogether -- it's too weird for Japonic ears, and the nearest legal sound already has a zillion competitors. So just drop it.
Since "ɢ" appears initially in P-Y, it is one source of P-J words that begin with a vowel.
Well well well, what do we have here...?
P-Y "ɢat" = "fire, hearth". Delete that troublesome "ɢ", and you get "at". Both "a" and "t" are fine as segments, and in that order, but coda consonants are banned in Japonic. So stick a dummy vowel on the end.
In OJ, the most common "t"-syllable is "to2", but that would violate Arisaka's law, since it would put "o2" in the same morpheme as "a". Subtly changing the vowel to "o1" would result in homophony with P-J "ato1" = "footprint".
So the next 2 most-common "t" syllables were chosen -- "ata" and "atu".
"Ata" forms the base for the total reduplicated phrase "ata + ata" = "atata" (after contraction of the 2 "a"s on either side of the morpheme boundary). This means "warm", and goes back at least to the 1700s, although I'm not sure how much further back.
"Atu" goes all the way back to P-J, though, and means "hot".
There are no other P-Y words of the form C + "at", in fact final "t" is pretty rare as well. So if the Japonic words are of Yeniseian origin, it would have to be from "ɢat" for phonetic reasons -- but that's a perfect semantic match as well!
How about final "ɢ"? The P-Y word for "eagle" is "dawɢ", which I do not think is related to the Japonic word for it, "taka". That would require the "a" to be preserved, but in all other examples I've shown, the coda glide turns into a vowel and replaces the preceding nuclear vowel. And it would require "ɢ" to become "k", which I don't think is going on with that Yeniseian consonant.
ReplyDeleteInstead, let the glide turn into a vowel and replace "a". So far, we've seen "w" turn into "u" and "o", usually "u". But this time, it's "o".
The "d" devoices to "t", and the "ɢ" drops out.
That yields "to", which forms the first half of P-J "təri" = bird. The second half, "ri", is a common noun-forming suffix ("thing", "one", etc.).
Wiktionary's entry for "tori" lists several instances of "to" being used as the 1st element of a compound, all relating to birds. E.g., "togari" (from "to + kari") = "bird-hunting", "toya" (from "to + ya") = "bird coop", and so on.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%B3%A5#Japanese
That entry also mentions possible cognates in Korean, including Middle Korean "tolk" and Modern Korean "dak" = "fowl, chicken". This could be the missing link to the final "ɢ" in the P-Y source -- perhaps Koreanic *did* try to preserve that troublesome segment as "k", while Japonic decided to drop it altogether.
Or, the speakers of Koreanic used to speak a different language, much as Japonic speakers used to speak an Altaic language (and before that, Yeniseian). And in this intermediary language, they tried to preserve the final "ɢ" of P-Y. But the point being, the Koreanic speakers or their predecessors tried to preserve it, while the Japonic speakers and their predecessors did not, even though both ultimately derive from a P-Y source.
As for the Middle Korean term, perhaps the "l" was trying to preserve the glide "w". It has the same number of segments as the P-Y source, and with very similar qualities -- 1st is an alveolar stop, 2nd is a vowel, 3rd is an approximant (liquid or glide), 4th is a back stop.
I don't think this means the Koreanic term is closer *in time* to the Yeniseian source, since we know Koreanic is a younger language family than Japonic. It's just that Koreanic phonotactics are better suited to handling Yeniseian phonotactics, like allowing coda consonants, including coda clusters of "approximant + stop".
Japonic phonotactics do not allow that, so its carry-over looks more different than the Koreanic carry-over -- but it came first in time, as the older language family.
P-Y "ɢej" = "big" and used in compounds to add special value, like grandfather, possibly "khagan" deriving from "big ruler", and so on.
ReplyDeleteP-J drops the "ɢ", the coda glide turns into "i" and replaces the nuclear vowel, yielding simply "i".
There's an archair Okinawan prefix "i" that adds special value or greatness to the noun it attaches to, e.g. "i + kutuba" = "legend", where "kutuba" = "word".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%84#Okinawan
In Japanese, there's a prefix "i" used in Shinto terms, adding a special, sacred, holy quality to the word they attach to. E.g., "i + noru" = "pray", where "noru" = "speak one's intention, usually to a deity".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%96%8E#Etymology_4
This sounds like the Japonic usage of the Sino element "dai" as a prefix, which also originally meant "big" in size in Chinese, but was extended to mean "large in importance, special-ness, value, etc."
P-Y "ɢan" = "conifer". In Japanese, there's a regional variant for "yew" that is "onko", which one source claims is of Ainu origin, but no such Ainu word is given.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%8A%E3%82%93%E3%81%93
The final "ko" almost certainly derives from P-J "kəi" = "tree". Usually, the "ko" in compounds goes first, and if it must go last, it's "ki". But after all, this is a regional variant, so perhaps they were fine with "ko" being the 2nd element in a compound tree name.
The main problem is, what does "on" mean? It must provide the species name, since "ko" just means "tree". And as we know, morphemes in Japonic cannot be bare vowel, and do not want to begin with a vowel. They'd rather be a consonant.
Perhaps there used to be a consonant there, but it was dropped between Yeniseian and Japonic.
Dropping "ɢ" from "ɢan" would yield "an" in P-J, not "on". There's no shortage of P-J words beginning with "an", so that doesn't seem to be a problem. And P-J would prefer sticking a dummy vowel on the end to make sure there are no coda consonants, even if there's going to be a suffix following it in a compound.
This is not the most straightforward etymology, but it is the best explanation that anyone has offered for "onko" referring to a coniferous tree.
P-Y "ɢajɢa" = "word, speech", and has the verb-nominalizing suffix "-ɢa", which means the unattested verb underlying it is "ɢaj" = "to say, speak".
ReplyDeleteDelete the "ɢ", "j" turns into "i" and replaces the nuclear vowel, yielding "i" yet again.
This is the root of the P-J verb "ipu" = "to say".
Now we're getting some mileage out of my analysis of the structure of Japonic verbs. The "p" in "ipu" is semantically vacuous, it's just a consonant preceding the verb final vowel "u". The preferred consonants "r" and "k" are already taken by OJ "iru" ("to enter") and P-J "iku" ("to come"). So next down in the hierarchy of dummy verb consonants, we get "p".
That dummy consonant sticks onto the semantically meaningful "i", which is of Yeniseian origin. And it explains why it begins with a vowel, against Japonic preferences -- it used to have a consonant back in Yeniseian, but it got deleted.
In fact, we know the "i" in "ipu" cannot be a Japonic-origin morpheme since they cannot be bare vowels. But if it began with a consonant, then all is fine. It *did* used to begin with a consonant (reflecting P-Y "ɢ"), but at some point it got deleted, leaving "i" as a meaning-bearing bare vowel in the P-J verb "ipu". The mystery is solved by noting that it was not always a bare vowel, so it could have born meaning in the past.
ReplyDeleteClarification, P-Y "dawɢ" = "to fly", while eagle derives from that, "dawɢVŋʷja" = "flying one". But as I've shown, these extra derivational and inflectional morphemes don't carry over into Japonic (and seemingly not Koreanic either). Just the semantic core, in this case the verb "to fly".
ReplyDeletePerhaps that's why Japonic preferred to add a nominalizing suffix to yield "tori", since they felt "to" was too close to the original part of speech, a verb or activity. To strengthen its noun status, stick "ri" on the end.
Koreanic didn't do that, they kept the coda cluster, which made it sound more noun-like in Koreanic, so no need to strengthen it with a nominalizing suffix.
Saving the big one for the finale! P-Y has a verb nominalizer suffix "ɢa", which we've already seen. In P-J, it would be simply "-a" after deleting the "ɢ".
ReplyDeleteBehold! The P-J suffix "-a" which attaches to verbs and yields a noun, which is the result of that verb. QED!
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/-a
Now, I said that morphologically complex words don't carry over every morpheme from P-Y to P-J. So, when "-ɢa" is used as a suffix for a particular word, it would not be carried over into P-J -- only the core of that particular word.
However, as a productive suffix in its own right, it *has* carried over -- as "-a". In this form, which is friendly to Japonic phonotactics, it *does* attach to verbs to yield nouns, but these verbs are Japonic verbs, not Yeniseian verbs.
This Yeniseian suffix is morphologically simple -- just one morpheme, "-ɢa". So, nothing to prevent it from carrying over into Japonic. Only when it's part of a complex word, does it fail to carry over.
This is yet another example of particles, affixes, and other closed-class morphemes carrying over from P-Y into P-J. I gave many already, e.g. the perfective verb affix, the nominal possessive connector affix, the interrogative stem, etc., carried over from Yeniseian into Japonic.
The key point is that these parts of speech are never borrowed or loaned across languages, let alone across language families.
The fact that Japonic has so many of these closed-class morphemes in common with Yeniseian, is that they share an origin. Not cuz they both descend from a common ancestor, but due to language shift -- Japonic speakers used to be Yeniseian speakers, and carried over many core elements of their old lexicon with them, even through the intermediate Altaic stage after Yeniseian but before Japonic.
Just want to say how grateful I have become for African-Americans, as one of the hold-outs of American culture during the collapsing imperial shithole era of American history. On the occasion of Christmas, and winter festivities, and the holiday spirit in general...
ReplyDeleteWhen you go out into the Real World these days in America, no matter where you are, you're in a small minority if you're American. There are so many foreigners here by now, thanks to Reaganism and accelerating during the Trump shithole era as well.
If you're a white American post-Boomer, you're in such a tiny minority that you feel like a stranger in your homeland.
That only leaves two demographic groups who are entirely American, but who you don't share everything with, to feel American with when you're in public space in the Real World.
One is Boomers, literally the most native-born generation in American history -- born decades after immigration stopped during the 1910s, but before the floodgates were thrown open by Reagan-era Republicans.
Only trouble with them is they're all at least your parents age (like me) or older. Cultures reproduce themselves throughout the generations, so when you sense that the only people who share your culture are all at least your parents' generation, it sends a strong signal that your culture is dwindling or over already.
Where there should be white Americans born after the Boomers, is a great big void, replaced by foreigners of all sorts of origins, which only compound the sense of alienation. You can't even identify with one of them, or even one region -- there are too many Latin American foreigners to create a cohesive Latin American-American community, let alone when they're also living cheek-by-jowl with a zillion different South Asians, Southeast Asians, Africans, and so on.
That sense of alienation and the end of your culture is most pronounced as you look at later and later births -- like kids who should be out trick-or-treating or sledding and having snowball fights.
The other group is African-Americans, who are 1 of the 3 core ethnic sub-groups in America -- Euro-Americans from before the Ellis Island era, or maybe including Ellis Islanders, American descendants of African slaves (not any ol' person with African DNA), and the Indians who were here in America before us (not any ol' person with New World DNA, we didn't conquer the Aztecs or Mayans or Incans, but the Cherokee, Navajo, and so on).
There's a tiny slice of Hispanic-origin Americans in the Southwest, who we took over during our expansion there, but it was thinly populated by Spanish-speakers at that time, since Mexico itself had only recently conquered it from the Southwest Indians. There are almost no core Americans of Hispanic descent -- those are Mexicans, Brazilians, etc., not Americans.
Cubans and Puerto Ricans, if they're from the Ellis Island era, go with the other Ellis Islanders. We conquered Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spain in 1898. By now lots of them don't even speak Spanish, like AOC, similar to Italians who gave up their language in America. Immigrants from Haiti don't count, since we never conquered them, and they've never been part of America.
It is often overlooked how many African Americans are traditional, particularly in the Black Belt Many still believe in separate gender roles.
DeleteAfrican-Americans are one of the 3 groups that have nowhere else to go in the whole world. They don't speak any language other than American English, they don't follow the folk customs of any African nation or culture, they don't practice any religion from over there, and they have no kin relations over there, through whom they could integrate into their society. They have never visited any part of Africa, and never will. In all these ways, they're the opposite of non-Americans who reside in America.
ReplyDeleteThey're stuck here, for better or worse, through thick and thin, in sickness and in health, whether they like it or not...
They're one of the three groups who you cannot seriously tell to "go back where you came from" -- they don't speak the language, follow the customs, practice the religion, or have kin networks to integrate into, anywhere outside of America. Euro-Americans from before / during the Ellis Island era, and the Indians from America, are the only other two groups -- what used to be 100% of the population, but now shrinking more and more after post-New Deal Republicans have thrown the borders open in the interest of cheap labor for employers.
So, during the Christmas season, when there should be Christmas spirit filling the air, it has instead gotten deader and deader, harder to breathe, a cultural vacuum choking out the life from American culture.
ReplyDeleteOne of the few pockets of air left in this flooding prison cell of a nation, is African-Americans. No other groups spontaneously talks to me in public, especially to pay compliments on my winter-season get-up. Complete strangers will stop me in the middle of the supermarket just to let me know how much they like the Christmas sweater, or fur hat, navy beret, or whatever else it may be. If it says "iconic American in winter", they go absolutely nuts for it.
And why wouldn't they? They too feel increasingly like foreigners in their own country. "Wow, get a load of this guy! Now THAT'S what we're supposed to see when we go out in public and brush shoulders with our neighbors during the Christmas season! Not some Indian neckbeard in flip-flops..."
Euro-Americans do this too, though they're more reserved, and they're mostly Boomers again. Euro-Americans under 60 mostly don't exist, and they've locked themselves indoors for the rest of their lives, to avoid the feeling of alienation and cultural dead-end-edness when they venture outside.
African-Americans are the only group that actually goes out in public, is proudly American, is excited when other Americans participate in hyping up the American cultural spirit, and hail from all generations. Just a couple weeks ago, an African-American girl of no older than 10 was the one who stopped me in the supermarket to say how much she loved my whole winter wonderland outfit. She was there with a sister and a mother or grandma in a Boomer-scooter.
And I don't live in a majority-black area. But even when I do go to the mostly-black area of town, they're just as likely to pay me compliments, joke around with me, and all that other stuff that makes you feel like you live in a culture larger than just yourself.
African-Americans are probably the biggest supporters of Halloween and Christmas, in the AMERICAN style of celebrating those holidays. It's taken for granted that they want their kids to dress up in a costume on Halloween or go trick-or-treating at least at school. It's a given that they're going to wear something with red and green near Christmas, or get their kids hyped up for Santa's visit, throw a Christmas party, and so on.
Well, what other choice do they have? They can't LARP as anything other than American. They don't know which African culture they came from, so they can't "dust off the Old World traditions" like some Euro-Americans do. They can't sneer at the American style of these holidays, in favor of some imagined superior culture that they LARP as. All they know is American Halloween, American Christmas, American Fourth of July, and so on. So it's American or nothing, for them.
You can't say that about any of the non-Americans residing in America. Even a large chunk of Euro-Americans still try to maintain some ties to the Old World that their ancestors came from, even if that conflicts with the American way of doing things.
African-Americans are the only group who are 100% committed to American culture, whether they planned it that way or not. Mostly not, and they adapted to the severing of links to their Old World culture by adopting an American-all-the-way attitude.
ReplyDeleteAnd although they have fostered a distinctly African-American sub-culture within the broader American culture, they have always preserved the American style at that higher / broader level. They have never tried to end Halloween or trick-or-treating -- either by a moralistic crusade or by ironic apathy / glib dismissal. They have never tried to cancel the Fourth of July cook-out, due to some imagined problematic nature of the American founding. They have never waged war on Christmas -- only Jews have ever done that.
For that matter, not even Muslim immigrants have ever dared to wage a war against Christmas, just cuz it's not what they do back in their homeland. Only Jews are that anti-American, and no I don't care if one or two generations of them created some of the iconic Midcentury American Christmas songs. That attitude obviously did not last very long, and is not only absent among them, it is anathema to them. They're the only demographic group that seethes and spits on Christmas.
And not cuz it's a Christian holiday. American Christmas has nothing to do with Jesus or Christianity, although it is timed to reflect the earlier practices of Euro-Americans from their Christian past. American Christmas is all centered around Santa, his elves, his reindeer, his sleigh, his bag of presents, coming down the chimney, cookies and milk left out for him, Christmas trees / boughs of holly, and all that other non-Christian stuff.
The main location for celebrating Christmas spirit in America is malls, or some kind of retail place like a department store, not church. Also the schools, which are not Christian either.
Only Indian Hindus threaten to follow the Jews in their Christmas-hating crusade. So far they're not so bad about it, but they have largely decided to follow the Jewish lead in general, so expect them to start bashing Christmas, malls, etc., like Republican flunkie wannabe Ramaswamy did last Christmas on Twitter.
In fact, there's a MENA baddie immigrant who works at a local supermarket, most likely Muslim, and seemingly from Iranian or maybe Afghani, or Pakistani origin. She wears her headscarf fairly loose, a la Iraniana, and she looks Indo-European rather than Saharo-Arabian.
ReplyDeleteAnnnnyyyyywaaaayyyyy -- she was just wearing a Santa hat with Christmas lights around the base of it. She was really into it! Nothing ironic or "ugly sweater" about it -- non-ironic fun and excitement! Even though it's not something her culture invented, and even though she's from a different religion than the one that its creators belonged to historically.
You just don't see that from Jews, American or foreign, despite them also being an "Abrahamic" religion that is not Christianity.
Back to African-American solid support for Christmas, they have continued contributing to the American Christmas song repertoire, after WWII. Usually in the soul / R&B genres, but those have always been listened to, and contributed to, by Euro-Americans. That includes the last Great American Christmas song, which is still played endlessly to this day, "All I Want for Christmas Is You" by Mariah Carey (one-quarter African-American, half Euro-American).
ReplyDeleteBy this point, the lesser American Christmas songs are kept alive by Euro-Americans who are country-adjacent, like Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, Kelly Clarkson, and so on.
In the good ol' days, though, EVERY genre contributed to Christmas music. As American society has begun fragmenting, only the core American groups still keep at it -- and that has meant jazz has largely left the tradition, given how many Jews and Ellis Islanders were members of that genre.
The only jazz-y strain in Christmas music over the past 50-some years has been its R&B descendant, from African-Americans, not the descendants of Irving Berlin.
Something to keep in mind -- all the stuff dumping on blacks has always been about destroying the American culture, economy, and society, by picking on the easiest target among core American groups. Well, them and Indians who live on reservations.
ReplyDelete"They're more criminal!"
"They're more drug-using!"
"Their ancestors didn't invent Baroque fugues!"
So? Neither did Jews from Kyiyiyiyiyiyiyivvvv. And their white-collar criminality has destroyed America far more than random muggings and murders by African-Americans. And Jews love drugs more than African-Americans do.
All of this "elite human capital" bullshit is merely about opening the floodgates to cheap foreign labor, whether blue or white collar. To do that, they need to shit all over Americans as dumb, lazy, drug-addicted, and so on -- worthless scum who rot in the gutter and need to be eradicated in order to make way for the elite human capital from some fake degree mill in Bangalore, peasants from El Salvador, or aspiring white-collar criminals from Tel Aviv.
African-Americans may be more criminal, drug-using, and lower in IQ than Euro-Americans, but that doesn't make them less American culturally. They're one of the 3 core American sub-groups, and membership in that club is not based on an IQ test, marijuana test, or criminal background check.
It's based on whether you're 100% committed to Fourth of July cook-outs, dressing up and trick-or-treating for Halloween, Christmas, roller rinks, malls, speaking only English, classic American music, and everything else that makes us distinctly American. And *not* trying to actively destroy all of those American cultural foundations.
I never used to get tons of spontaneous compliments from African-Americans in public -- not that they antagonized me either. I've never been in a fight or stand-off with an African-American. Every fight I've been in was with a Hispanic.
But these days, I think African-Americans, too, have grown weary of all the non-Americans flooding our country, and even though I'm obviously not from their sub-group, I'm still from the same higher-level group of American that they are. And it's a real breath of fresh air for them, so they're happy to let me know and encourage me to keep out it.
And I'm grateful to them for their encouragement! ^_^ It's nice to see some Americans still eager to see some American culture in public. I would be doing it anyway, but it's better with some encouragement and motivation, and that's rarer and rarer to come by these days in the collapsing post-imperial shithole of America.
*One fight in elementary school was with a Chinese.
ReplyDelete*encourage me to keep "at" it.
ReplyDeleteAnother sign of wishy-washy-ness among Ellis Islanders, who are not Jews, is Italians. Yeah, they're not as anti-American as Jews -- not a high bar to clear.
ReplyDeleteBut I was just casually browsing some lists of American Christmas songs, and looking for the ones that are designed to desecrate American Christmas.
One is "Fuck Christmas" by Fear, whose only constant member is Italian-American.
Another is the uber-cringe-y "Dick in a Box", written by 2 Jews and someone who's 1/4 Italian and 1/4 Puerto Rican (another Ellis Island group that's Catholic and formerly Romance-speaking).
That made me ask, "I wonder if Lady Gaga ever made a Christmas song?" Yes she did, in 2008, same time as "Dick in a Box" -- "Christmas Tree", which is a very lame attempt at a gay / ho anthem on the topic of fucking on Christmas, cuz that's supposedly what it makes everyone think about, not Santa or gift-giving or malls or public spirit or even love (just fucking) or any of that truly Christmas stuff.
Italian-Americans are perhaps half-American by now, but the other half have decided, like Indian Hindus, to follow the lead of American Jews. If that means ironically or otherwise corroding Christmas a la Americana, well, that's no real price to pay. They were never historically into American Christmas -- their ancestors were into Roman Catholic Christmas, or Italian folk traditions like La Befana.
And they were a huge part of the jazz genre here, including its Christmas songs -- like "Linus and Lucy" by the Vince Guaraldi Trio, for "A Charlie Brown Christmas" from 1965.
Since Italian-Americans are not country-adjacent, that leaves only Italian-American R&B singers to sincerely contribute to -- or at least, preserve what others have created -- the American Christmas songbook. None come to mind, though.
As with so much else of American culture, Glorious Nippon remains one of the few repositories of it, as it is being actively destroyed within the nation that created it.
ReplyDeleteNowa-san no aaku...
Sometime later tonight I hope to get back on track with Japanese posting. Just want to say for now how great it is that there are Japanese companies like Hololive that are keeping the American Christmas spirit alive, even as the American empire itself is crumbling and as its culture is vanishing along with it, internally...
Forgot about the altercation with the Indian (native kind), back when I lived out West. Only time I've ever stalked and tracked someone down like they're not even human, and I were a hunter. I didn't kill him, though. Just enough to deter him from being a public nuisance in the future. He shoved me on a dark street, out of nowhere, although I didn't even get thrown off-balance, but it was a decent effort to body-check me.
ReplyDeleteI probably broke his nose when I tracked him down and got him back, but I didn't stick around to see how bad it was -- made a clean immediate escape, despite there being lots of people around. It took awhile to get the perfect opportunity to get revenge, *and then* make sure nobody saw or would report it. Before that -- tracking him around in the outdoors -- was the easy part, just tedious cuz he kept taking endless cigarette breaks and circling around, so I couldn't get too close.
Once he went inside a building, though, it was game over for him. When you're outdoors, especially at night, you're probably the only one there -- if someone is trying to close in on you, it's easy to hear that. Inside a building with all sorts of people, lights, furniture, etc., there's sensory overload, and you let your guard down cuz even if someone is tracking you down, it gets disguised under all that other sensory input.
Yes, he started it, totally unprovoked, probably while drunk / on something, wanting to act like a badass by being a public nuisance. I have never tolerated that kind of crap, I usually intervene to shut someone like that down even when I'm not the target of their nuisance. But especially on the very rare occasions where I *am*...
As fate would have it, we ended up sitting about 10 feet from each other in a Starbucks some months later, and he didn't even look me in the eye, kept his head down sheepishly the whole time. I didn't rub it in his face either. We already had an altercation, then let bygones be bygones... or maybe he was too drunk / high to remember that night, or my face.
That was a real "the Wild West is still alive" moment. When you're back East, you assume there are no more Indians in America, or if there are some, they're just crafting Kachina dolls all day or something, not prowling the dark streets while drunk, looking to randomly spoil for a fight with whoever crosses their path. And the anarchic environment where you have to punish them yourself, not rely on the powerless state to do it for you.
That incident didn't make me hate Indians (native kind), though. It was more of a "welcome to the Wild West" feeling.
There was a Navajo girl in one of the classes I was in, and she was a real babe, not only physically attractive but very smiley and wide-eyed and libidinal -- that also has the effect of not making me hate them. ^_^
That's part of a general pattern I discussed not too long ago -- anarchic shitholes usually have very good-looking women, since that's the only trait that the high-T rowdy marauder men are interested in. Southern Italy, Northern Lebanon -- and the American Southwest.
Actually, that reminds me of another altercation out in the Wild West -- with a tweaker, white guy, probably heritage American, but meth-head American.
ReplyDeleteI was walking toward the entrance of the supermarket, and this tweaker freak comes out, looks me in the eyes intensely, then immediately stares down at the ground, while heading on a very fast nervous collision course with me. Like, if he isn't looking at me, he's not doing it on purpose? IDK, his brain was fried.
I didn't swerve, checked him with my shoulder, maybe leaning into it a bit for extra oomph, and that sucker fell straight to the ground! Naturally, he looked up like it was my fault, cried "hey, c'mon, why'd you do that?" etc., trying to get sympathy from the onlookers. Nobody cared, though.
I went inside, he didn't follow me -- went to wherever he was originally heading -- and one woman followed me inside to tell me how ridiculous that guy was, can you believe that?, etc. And said good job for standing your ground.
Probably another incident like that that I'm forgetting.
But the point remains -- the fight-fights I've gotten in where only / mainly with Hispanics, and the only heritage Americans I've had altercations with were from the lowest rungs of their sub-groups, likely on drugs at the time, and even then, I've never had an altercation with a black crack-head or anything like that.
Jose Feliciano is Puerto Rican, BTW, back to the topic of heritage Americans and cultural contributions to the American Christmas songbook. Mexicans and other Central Americans have not contributed, cuz they're mostly foreigners residing here. There could be some old-timers from Texas or SoCal or New Mexico who've made regional contributions, but nothing at the national scale like "Feliz Navidad".
ReplyDeleteAnd the Hispanics I've had altercations with, I'm sure were Central American, not Puerto Rican or Cuban, since I've never lived around the latter, and there's no huge nationwide flood of Puerto Ricans.
I guess Nippon posting will have to wait until tomorrow. But speaking of anarchic regions of a country, and what the women look like, I'm reminded of the story that Vivi told about when some foreigners in Japan tried to pick her pocket, and she chased them down, pushed the woman to the ground, and berated her about why did she even come to Japan if she's just going to be a criminal?
ReplyDeleteThat is *very* Kansai behavior -- take the law into your own hands, cuz the central state hardly exists where you are... Although the imperial court was in Kyoto, de facto state power was exercised by the Shogun in Edo / Tokyo. So, Osaka has been more anarchic than places in the East or North of Japan. That's why the Yakuza flourish in Osaka rather than Tokyo or Sapporo.
It also means that Kansai girls are probably better-looking than girls from the East or North. Not trying to stoke any regional rivalries, just an observation... and my own grandmother was from very far north, Hokkaido. I have no personal pro-Kansai bias.
Of course there are babes from Kanto and Tohoku and Hokkaido, but I'll bet that *on average*, Kansai and maybe the West too is better-looking.
You can't judge from Tokyo or its larger metro area, since people from all over Japan flock there. If you see a babe on the streets of Tokyo, she could easily be a transplant from Osaka or Fukuoka.
That being said I agree black Americans get too much shit and are fellow heritage Americans for better or worse.
ReplyDeleteMillennials and Zoomers think getting in fights is only something that happens in movies -- no, it happens IRL when you're not dickless and cocooned from birth to grave, as the helicopter parents have sadly made Millennials and Zoomers. Getting into fights is par for the course for Gen X, who grew up during the height of the most recent crime wave (1958-1992).
ReplyDeleteIf I'd been a Millennial or Zoomer, I never would've been walking a dark street at night, I'd be playing video games in an exurb bedroom. And even if I did get shoved by an Indian street prowler, I would've just bitched about it on the internet.
But I didn't -- I hunted him down over the course of a few hours and made sure he got 10 times what he gave me, most of that time due to him taking so many breaks and circling around so he could've seen a follower.
Another thing that the gaymer generation has never done -- hunt anything IRL, even game animals. They're too cocooned and bubble-wrapped.
Certainly something that a rightoid would never do, we've seen by now they're all talk and no action. How has getting revenge for Charlie Kirk gone, BTW? You won't get revenge on an assassin, so you'd back down 100% on some random guy shoving you on the street. That's why I'm a non-voter or indie voter...
This happened over 10 years ago, but I didn't post about it at the time, cuz I don't live on the internet. Only now is it apropos, talking about the ethnic groups who've ever tried to try something with me.
I'm leaving aside others, too, like the time I won an all-out chase through crowded city streets -- me being the getaway driver this time. Some (Hispanic yet again) punk tried to be clever, I was more clever back, he got pissed and started chasing after me in his car with his fat Hispanic gf, and over the course of what seemed like hours, but probably was only 20-30 minutes, I was weaving in and out of traffic (lawfully), timing the approach to lights perfectly so they went red just as he was approaching, blasting Kick by INXS the whole time (this was the height of the '80s revival), and finally he gave up and turned away...
Later he bitched to the cops like a bitch, I got a call from one, but after I gave my side, they figured it was either his fault or a he-said / he-said situation, and I didn't hear from the cops again. Sucks to lose that chase after trying to act cute on the mean streets of the Wild West!
I did brag about that episode at the time, but to my brother IRL, not on here. That must've been 15 years ago... exciting times, the early 2010s, unless you were a gaymer Millennial shut-in. ^_^
It's sad to see Kanata graduate... I will always remember her as a shrine maiden for Japanese culture, cuz she and Marine are the queens of enka. ^_^
ReplyDeleteNot many vtubers, even the idols, preserve the enka tradition. In fact she sang the power ballad to end all power ballads, "Amagi Goe", during her last karaoke...
And her concert duet with Marine for this song, with the full Showa-era TV stage aesthetic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i16MlLBSz9g
Whatever she does next, I hope she finds a way to continue preserving classic and iconic Japanese culture.
On reflection, Black Lives Matter was an attempt to kick out "brown" / "POC" agendas from the Democrat party, and bring African descendants of slaves in America back to the forefront.
ReplyDeleteThat's why they didn't say Brown Lives Matter, Non-White Lives Matter, POC Lives Matter, etc.
And that's why they made police brutality their main topic -- not something that applies to Indians, Filipinos, Salvadoreans, and whoever else had wormed their way into the Democrat network by the 2010s. Also, not something that applied to fags or trannies -- the focus of both the Democrat establishment and activists during the 2010s. Also, not something that targets women.
By trying to make the focus about police brutality, or reparations for slavery, African-Americans were trying to defend *their* hard-won turf in the Democrat network, against all sorts of newcomers looking to squeeze their hand in the civil rights cookie jar.
Any civil rights BS that is not about African-Americans and the legacy of slavery, is less money and protection for them, and re-directed to some group that has nothing to do with them, like "women" in general, or fags / trannies.
More than just a naked defense of their own patronage hand-outs, it was an attempt to put the party's focus back on heritage Americans, who've been here since forever and have nowhere else to go -- not Indian code monkeys, Salvadorean drywallers, gloryhole visitors, men in dresses, and so on and so forth. BLM activists were not pushing Drag Queen Story Hour, it was an edgy branding for a mainstream appeal -- normie African-Americans who live for summer cook-outs.
And that's why the rest of the Democrats, establishment and activist alike, went into over-drive to steer things away from the old-school focus on African-Americans and slavery. Instead of focusing on "Black", they made it about "White" and "Whiteness" -- how to become less white, problematic whiteness, white privilege, bla bla bla.
Well, that's an easy way to make the focus about anyone who's not-white, like all shades of browns, POC, or whatever term. Shitting on white people doesn't mean elevating African-Americans -- it means anyone and everyone who decides they're Not-White (TM), and ipso facto entitled to all the civil rights goodies that Not-White (TM) groups are owed.
Only blacks themselves insisted on the phrase "Black Lives Matter" -- every other libtard cockblocked the blacks, and insisted on the "Whiteness" framing, to keep the expanding numbers of non-black browns happily inside the Democrat tent.
Blacks wanted these newcomers, many / most of whom aren't even American, out of the party's patronage network at a minimum -- maybe out of the country as well! But at least, slapping the brown / POC hand out of the civil rights cookie jar, which was intended only for African descendants of slaves in America.
Blacks got jackshit under usurper Biden's term, despite being the most loyal Democrat voter base. The Democrat focus on non-black browns, women, fags / trannies, etc., kept accelerating. And the framework remained "Whiteness" rather than "Black, and only Black".
But blacks had to give it a try, even if it wasn't guaranteed to pay off. Otherwise they would've gotten thrown out of the party altogether. They had to defend their turf from invaders.
So in many ways, BLM was the mirror-image of MAGA, also another "hail Mary" pass to save their own turf within their party's network, against all sorts of invaders, overlapping heavily with the invaders of the Democrat party.
ReplyDeleteEnough focus on globalism, return the focus to heritage Americans, who by the 2010s had begun to get less than nothing from their party's network.
Just as BLM was co-opted to focus on tearing down "Whiteness" rather than handing out goodies to the livers of Black Lives, so too was MAGA co-opted to be the same ol' 21st-century neocon globalism, but with edgy racist nihilist branding instead of fuddy-duddy moralizing White Man's Burden branding.
"America first doesn't mean America only" -- exact same co-optation as "Anti-Whiteness" instead of "Black, and Black Only".
Just as blacks got jackshit under Biden, despite being the most loyal voters, heritage Euro-Americans are getting jackshit under Trump -- just like his first term. Now both the GOP establishment and activist network / media ecosystem has shifted to pushing for infinite Indians, taxing Boomers even less, printing trillions more / slashing interest rates to drive inflation higher, getting humiliated in yet another lost war (Venezuela, for the umpteenth time there), sacrificing heritage America to Israeli parasites, and whatever else they choose to re-brand from their Reaganite / Bushie foundation.
But what else were heritage Americans (Euro type) supposed to do by the 2010s? They had to try. It failed to reform the party, just as BLM failed to reform the Democrats.
And that's why there's such an endless incurable implosion now -- both parties refused to improve themselves, so now they can't rely on compliance from the population, which means a de facto end to national governance.
As the American Empire enters its de jure fragmentation phase of its lifespan, reformers of the old dead parties will only spring up at the sub-national level, like Newsom becoming the Grand Duke of California and Pacifica.
I'm sure that, by now, "Black Lives Matter" rings as hollow in African-American ears as "Make America Great Again" does in Euro-American ears. Just a bittersweet reminder of a last-ditch effort for survival, getting co-opted and betrayed by your own so-called leaders, and demoted back to the end of the line for provisions and protections by supposed patrons.
ReplyDeleteThat awareness must be part of why African-Americans are way more eager to interact with and get friendly with heritage Euro-Americans in public this past year or so.
"Black Lives Matter" didn't mean "Kill Whitey", it meant "The civil rights cookie jar is for black hands only".
And "They have to go back" didn't mean descendants of slaves going back to Africa, it meant foreigners going back to wherever they can integrate into.
Just as there are tons of African immigrants here now, there are tons of Euro / white immigrants here as well -- not Euros who came over here in the 1600s like my ancestors, but some Yuke-wad who's greedy to earn more money here than back in Kyiyiyiyiyivvvvv.
That's why the "descendants of slaves" phrase was crucial -- to exclude everyone else with African DNA, cuz DNA doesn't determine what ethnic group you belong to. African-Americans are their own ethnic group, incapable of integrating into any other culture or society on Earth, including everywhere in Africa.
Heritage Euro-Americans need to start using phrases like that, "Mayflower Americans" or something.
America should be for, of, and by Mayflower Americans, Descendants of Slaves Americans, and American Indians. Thanksgiving Americans -- no wonder the system is so dedicated to eradicating Thanksgiving, it's too foundational to our history, leaving out Ellis Islanders and Neoliberal immigrants.
Ellis Islanders have always been iffy. By now, the most powerful group among them, Jews, has turned bitterly anti-American (and they were behind the co-optations of both the BLM and MAGA grassroots movements). Probably half of the Italians are following their lead. Probably half the Irish too. Likewise Eastern Euros, especially since Russia re-asserted itself in their homelands -- why give a damn if you're American? Anyone who cares, is not American, but an Eastern Euro-wad still butthurt about the Russian Empire dominating them.
Ellis Islanders at least gave up their non-English languages, but they're starting to de-Americanize in other aspects of culture. Becoming Catholic or Orthodox instead of Mormon or Pentecostal, for example. Abandoning the American musical genre that their ancestors played a key role in -- jazz. Abandoning Christmas music, shitting on suburbia, etc... just go back to wherever your ancestors came from, then. Problem solved.
And many of them will, as America breaks apart and gets much much poorer...
Ellis Islanders were responsible for passing Hart-Celler
DeleteWhat about German Americans, particularly in the Midwest. They are technically the largest ethnic group in the USA with there being more Americans of German descent alone than all Americans of African descent!
ReplyDeletehttps://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/12/06/largest-ethnic-group-germans-english/
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/3lnf5b/counties_where_germanamericans_are_the_largest/
Yet they by and large completely vanished as a distinct ethnic group in the wake of American involvement in WWI due to a massive stigmatization campaign.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2015/02/05/the-silent-minority
https://www.unz.com/isteve/whatever-happened-to-germa-america/
That's just people who are 1/4 or 1/64 German claiming they're "German-American" rather than their 3/4 "British-American", "French-American", or other founding stock American roots.
ReplyDeleteThere were some Germans here early, but their large numbers are due to Ellis Island immigration -- and like all other Ellis Islanders, they flocked to cities to work in factories. Cities everywhere always are demographic sinks, so their population never expanded -- throw that in with their cultural assimilation, and that's why there's no more German-American identity.
Their apparent large size is Americans trying to downplay their founding stock origins, like Liz Warren and other Boomers claiming they have Indian blood, which is never true. Or someone with a German surname, but 3/4 of their genes come from Britain and France, or maybe Holland, y'know the people who actually founded the nation and its genepool.
Since the founding stock arrived earliest, they had the largest expansion -- fertility rates through the roof. They had to fight off Indians, but otherwise the land was theirs for the cultivating, which fed a population boom for many generations.
*That* is why there's so many Americans, and why they're mostly of founding stock, until the floodgates were thrown open recently by the neolib Republicans like Reagan, Bushes, and Trump / Vance.
Germans and Scandis did enjoy a bit more of an expansion compared to other Ellis Islanders, cuz they had more farmers among them, and they were given free fertile farmland in the Midwest / Plains. But no, they are not the largest ancestry group in America, they just play up their non-founding stock side like every American does -- including me, I love mentioning my Hokkaido born-and-raised grandmother, cuz it adds to my exotic appeal... but the other 3/4 of my genes trace back to British and French settlers from the 1600s. I think the only Ellis Island ancestors I have are Scotch-Irish, although they could've been here earlier, we're not sure about that.
Non-Americans are always shocked to learn the truth about Thanksgiving Americans, but it's true. Most heritage Americans have ancestors who are referred to in a Wikipedia article on some infamous Indian raid hundreds of years ago. Including me.
I don't have any German blood, but even if I did, I don't think I would play that up -- Germans are too boring. I don't get why 1/4 German-Americans do that -- perhaps it's a relic from the Melting Pot era, where being non-founding stock meant you got civil rights goodies. But being a "white ethnic" gets you less than zero these days, so why bother trying to make yourself look exotically German, when German culture isn't that exciting, and you get no goodies from the state anyway?
I could see if they were hyping up Romantic painters, Baroque fugues (some of them *are* proud of Bach writing their Lutheran sacred music, and that's cool), and so on. But mostly they hype up drinking beer, eating tons of bread, being fat and oafish, and autistic about pesky labyrinthine rule systems, and being "Midwestern nice" AKA false politeness.
Strange people...
That's another mechanism for ethnic "purification" during imperial collapse -- the fact that most foreigners are greedy opportunists flocking to cities, cuz that's where the wealth is concentrated, not hardscrabble farm cultivation, nomadic pastoralism, and so on in a rural setting.
ReplyDeleteSince cities are demographic sinks, they are only replenished by new arrivals from non-urban surroundings.
When there's tons of wealth concentrated in imperial cities, foreigners can be replenished by wave after wave of greedy immigrants. But when the empire collapses, there's no more sky-high wealth to go around, in the cities or elsewhere. So new arrivals of foreigners cease, and many of the existing foreigners will return to where they came from -- the only goal of immigrations is to get rich quick.
"But what about those who stay? They'll form a permanent sub-group that keeps reproducing itself, and they'll be an enduring minority. And put all such foreign remnants together, and that means even the post-collapse landscape is largely foreigners."
Wrong -- urbanites don't reproduce themselves. So if the foreign population is mostly / entirely urban, they will undergo population contraction until they no longer exist.
That will happen to native urbanites, of course -- but native urbanites can be replenished by native ruralites, if they choose to urbanize. Or the ruralites will stay in the rural area, and have higher fertility than if they urbanized.
Either way, the native population reproduces itself thanks to the rural population being mostly / entirely native. The foreign population shrinks itself into oblivion cuz they're mostly / entirely urban.
That's why there was no more Eastern Med DNA in Italy after the Crisis of the Third Century, when the Roman Empire bit the dust, especially in Italy vs. Anatolia. There was no more piles of wealth to attract new immigrants from Syria, existing Syrians in Rome said "this place sucks now, let's go back where it's better for us," and the Syrians who decided to stay in Rome, the city, failed to reproduce themselves, like all urbanites -- and with no Syrians from rural Italy to replenish their numbers, they ceased to exist in the Italian genepool.
Same will happen with all foreign ethnicities in the collapsing American Empire.
Do the suburbs count as rural or urban in this analysis?
DeleteThe blacks are also returning back to the South, another example of a foreign ethnicity moving back to their homelands when the empire collapses.
DeleteIn case any fans of Kanata need some help dealing with her graduation, and have moved past the denial stage, some classic songs to play on loop from the Sad Seventies... perfect for channeling the winter blues as well, if you're in the Northern Hemisphere.
ReplyDelete"I'd Rather Leave While I'm in Love" by Rita Coolidge
"All Out of Love" by Air Supply (1980, but close enough)
"Mandy" by Barry Manilow
"Yesterday Once More" by the Carpenters
"Can't Smile Without You" by the Carpenters
Suburbanites being like urbanites or ruralites depends on what their fertility is like.
ReplyDelete"Suburbs" encompasses a very wide range of ecological niches in America. Some are appendages of the city -- as dense, as status-striving, as wealthy. Therefore, more like urbanites, not high fertility, only replenished by newcomers from outside the "urban core + suburban annex" metropolis. They're metropolitan.
Then there are the further distant rings of suburbs, including exurbs, where it's more sprawling than dense, lower-status, not very wealthy (some are wealthy, of course). More country than town. That's where people go to have 3, 4, 5 kids these days -- and their McMansion homes with enough rooms to fit all those people, reflect that higher fertility.
It's unlikely that those people are former urbanites changing to rural-ish living. They likely grew up in a similar niche themselves, not necessarily the same exurb -- but moving from one exurb to another. From one outer-ring suburb to another.
Metropolitans don't reproduce themselves, though -- they're way more likely to represent a change of niche by degree of urbanization.
Nonstop Nihongo New Year! After Nonstop Nihongo November and Nonstop Nihongo Noel, we keep it going right through the New Year!
ReplyDeleteToday's discovery was inspired by watching Vivi's recent stream where she played the original Super Mario Bros for the first time ever! She said it's the first retro game of any kind, that she's ever played. And she thought it was fun! She played it for 4 hours, and had great reactions all along. Very entertaining. ^_^
Playing retro games is like learning kanji -- a rite of passage that transforms you from a Japanese child into a Japanese adult. ^_^
OK, at one point she jumped on a koopa troopa, and kicked its shell forward. One of the funnest things to do in Mario games. She called it "kame de sakkaa" -- "soccer with turtles".
This word "kame" really caught my attention, cuz the accent is on the 2nd syllable -- "ka-ME", not "KA-me". That usually means that, earlier, that accented syllable was really 2 separate syllables, and the heavy weight of 2 syllables has been preserved in the form of the pitch accent on the single syllable that survives.
Wiktionary has no etymology for it whatsoever, but the cliff-dwelling sage has figured it out!
First I looked through other languages' word for "turtle" -- and bingo, in Middle Korean it was "kepwup", which Wiktionary notes has the same element "kep" as the words for "skin, bark" and "shell".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%EA%B1%B0%EB%B6%81#Korean
That sounds very familiar -- it's "kapa" in Proto-Japonic, and it also means "skin, hide, bark", "leather", and "side, surface / covering of something". In this case, it must mean "shell":
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/kapa
That's the first half of the compound, now onto the second. Wiktionary notes that the OJ form must have derived from a P-J form "kamaCi", where C is some consonant -- the consonant that weakened and deleted, leaving 1 syllable ("ai") instead of 2 ("aCi").
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%8B%E3%82%81#Old_Japanese
The only consonant to reliably weaken and delete, especially between vowels, is "w". It could have been "w" originally, or it could have been "p", which softened into "w" between vowels. In this case, it is "p" -- and the P-J word it comes from is "upai", meaning "top":
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/upai
The Korean variant is telling, cuz it shows that the 2nd consonant was not originally "m" -- it was a labial stop, "p". Well, over time in Japanese, "b" has softened to "m", e.g. "keburi" -> "kemuri" ("smoke"). And that includes "p" softening to "m", as in P-J "naynpuru" -> OJ "neburu" -> MJ "nemuru" ("to sleep").
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/naynpuru
Putting this all together, that means the original word was a compound, "kapa + upai", meaning "shell + top" -- a creature whose top is a shell.
So how did "kapa + upai" become "kame"? The final "ai" contracts to "e2" in OJ. Vowel sequences are not allowed, and usually the 2nd replaces the 1st, so at the morpheme boundary "a + u" becomes "u". This yields "kapupe2".
ReplyDeleteThe 2nd "p" softens to "w" then deletes, yielding "kapue2".
Notice those other cases where "p" / "b" softens to "m" -- they were followed by "u". The "p" here is followed by "u", softening it to "m", yielding "kamue2".
The ban on vowel sequences, and the 2nd one replacing the 1st, deletes the "u", yielding "kame2" -- QED!
I am very grateful to Vivi for sparking my curiosity about this word, and for enjoying her first experience with retro games! I hope she plays more in the future. ^_^
More on the relationship between Japonic and Koreanic. Related to the topic of the main post, how "r" is by far the preferred final consonant in Japonic verb stems, the same thing was true in Koreanic. Both families only have one liquid consonant, which is transcribed as "r" for Japonic but "l" for Koreanic. From "A History of the Korean Language" by Lee & Ramsey (2011):
ReplyDelete"Old Korean reflexes of syllable-final liquids merit particularly close examination, because in Middle Korean, syllable-final /l/ appears to have been the result of an earlier consonant merger. One such indication is that Middle Korean verb stems ending in -l- were at least four times greater in number than stems ending in any other consonant. Second, these stems were differentiated by tone in ways that other stems were not: in Middle Korean texts, (monosyllabic) l-stems were either marked with a low, high, or long rising tone, or they belonged to a class of stems whose pitch alternated between low and rising. This kind of distribution across the tone classes was true of no other stem-final consonant. There were other morphophonemic oddities as well."
I attributed the preference for "r" as the default final consonant for Japonic verb stems, to avoiding homophones with other common suffixes and particles. IDK if the same variation in pitch accent patterns is prevalent in Japonic verbs ending in "r", as opposed to other consonants.
But it's possible that final "r" in Japonic verb stems represents a consonant merger of a kind -- namely, Yeniseian final consonants, which themselves seem to have had a dummy status. Yeniseian has tons more consonants than Japonic (or Koreanic), like velar fricatives, uvulars, labialized velars, and so on. So when carrying over Yeniseian verbs into Japonic, a lot of those exotic consonants in Yeniseian will get "merged" into "r" in Japonic.
It's not really a "merger", which usually means closely related sounds -- like "t" and "d" getting merged into just "t" (or just "d"). The Japonic verb stems ending in "r" are more like a "catch-all" container for a wide variety of consonants that are present in Yeniseian but absent in Japonic -- not a merger of similar sounds.
If Koreanic speakers also used to be Yeniseian speakers -- and I haven't looked into that at all -- then the same process may be happening in Koreanic. In fact, it doesn't matter which language was their former language -- it could've been Nivkh, which also has tons of exotic consonants, like uvulars, velar fricatives, etc.
Proto-Koreanic has a small phoneme inventory, much like P-J. So when P-K speakers are carrying over words from their previous language, a lot of those exotic consonants will get lumped into a catch-all container.
The interesting question then is "Why do Koreanic and Japonic use the same consonant for their catch-all container at the end of verb stems" -- the liquid consonant? That makes it look more like a shibboleth, and therefore a cognate, going back to a time when these speakers were part of the same speech community.
ReplyDeleteOr maybe Koreanic and Japonic coincidentally have a similar set of suffixes and particles that are avoided due to homophony, and the only remaining consonant is the liquid.
But even that seems to be due to shared phonotactics, and hence a shared origin of a sort.
Namely, the liquid consonant is banned in initial position in native Koreanic words, exactly like in Japonic. Therefore, there's no way to confuse final "l" in a verb stem, with initial "l" in a particle, suffix, etc. Exact same reason why Japonic chose the liquid consonant as its catch-all final consonant in verb stems.
Yeah yeah yeah, banning initial liquids could be an "areal feature", not necessarily a shared origin. But that's a cope, I think "areal features" are still mostly artifacts of language expansion and switching, and two supposedly unrelated languages continue to share some areal feature cuz their ancestors used to speak a single language, before one or both of them switched languages in the meantime.
Or they're both incorporating speakers of a 3rd language, like Ainu in the case of Koreanic and Japonic, and the preferences of that 3rd language are being inherited into both of the families that are supposedly not related in origin.
That's the whole problem -- looking at "language origin" as a uni-parental process, rather than bi-parental or multi-parental. If it's an isolated group of hunter-gatherers, maybe uni-parental works. But when cultures are expanding, incorporating speakers of other language families, then all bets are off -- it's at least a bi-parental synthesis, not just the latest generation of a uni-parental descent.
And languages and cultures have been expanding like CRAZY in Northeast Asia, since prehistory. Yukaghir feeding into Uralic, Uralic expanding all the way to Scandinavia, Yeniseian spreading into the Xiongnu steppe confederation, the Wa people entering the Korean Peninsula and then Japanese islands where they incorporated the Emishi / Ainu speakers, and so on and so forth.
So Koreanic and Japonic may share one out of two parents. Or if they have 3 parents, they share 2 or 1 and a half parents. But they're clearly related to some degree by a shared origin.
Yeniseian origin of Japonic "upai" = "above, over, upper, top, etc."? Speaking of this word, I notice a potential origin in the Proto-Yeniseian list -- "ugʷ" = "long". The labialized velar, as I've shown before, turns into a labial stop, "p". Then it needs a dummy vowel at the end to avoid coda consonants, and in OJ "pa" is by far the most common "p" syllable (and "pi" is next).
ReplyDeleteThat yields "upa" or an alternate form "upi", which may account for the "upai" vowel variation. QED on the phonetics.
As for the semantics, there is no word for "above, upper, top" etc. in P-Y, although there does seem to be one for "lower" ("wod"). So there was nothing to carry over into P-J. However, there is a word about spatial dimensions, "long", and that refers to a higher value on the scale, as opposed to "short", so that would seem to match better with "upper, top" as opposed to "lower, below, bottom", which would want the smaller scale word "short".
When you stand something "long" on its end, it's "tall", with a prominent "upper" area or "top". It was something of an extension, as it were, of the spatial dimension word from P-Y, but it was the best they could do since there was no existing P-Y word for "upper, top, above".
BTW, P-J words for "bottom, lower" ("sita" and "simo"), do *not* come from the P-Y word for "lower" ("wod"). I don't see any convincing close phonetic matches either...
ReplyDeleteYeniseian origin for P-J "sawo" = "pole" (later, "neck" of an instrument, "rod", "stick", etc.). In P-Y "ɬa" is a common element in words relating to "protrusion" or "extension". The verb for "to extend" is "ɬaw". The noun ("protrusion, extension") adds a generic nominalizer suffix "ja" onto that verb, "ɬawja".
ReplyDeleteAs before, I don't think morphologically complex words carried over, but some smaller meaningful morpheme, so definitely not the complex noun "ɬawja".
But even sticking with the verb "ɬaw", running that through P-J phonotactics would make the "ɬ" (a voiceless coronal fricative) into "s", and sticking a dummy vowel on the end would yield "sawo" since "wo" is the most common "w" syllable in OJ. QED.
Other P-J words beginning with "sa" and having to do with a protrusion or extension --
"Saki" = "point, tip" and "cape, peninsula" (with "ki" as a dummy nominal suffix)
"Sanki" = "heron" with its prominent protruding bill. As usual, no evidence for the nasal, probably re-analyzed as a two-word compound and rendaku applied. Same dummy nominal suffix as in "saki" above.
"Sasa" = Japanese bamboo, alluding to its shoots or trunk looking like a protruding pole. Total reduplication of "sa".
"Saya" = "sheath, scabbard", where "ya" may be the P-J word for "house", i.e. a house or case for a protruding object like a sword, rod, etc.
"Sawo" may also be "sa" = "prefix related to protrusion" + "wo" = "tail, end of an object" from P-J (which as I showed earlier, is itself from P-Y origins).
ReplyDelete"Sawo" refers to the entire rod, not just the end or tail of it, but "wo" does have to do with an object's length, and rods are more lengthy than wide.
"Wo" is an odd dummy syllable to choose, so either it's meaningful and means "tail, end", or the "w" belongs to the root as in the P-Y verb "ɬaw".
Lest I be accused of cherry-picking or "random chance", there are only 9 P-J words beginning with "sa" in Wiktionary. So that's 5 of 9 that have to do with protrusion, extension -- not a coincidence, but stemming from a shared origin in Yeniseian "ɬa".
ReplyDeleteAlso, in "saya" = "scabbard", perhaps the "sa" refers to the fact that the scabbard is protruding out from the wearer's body. It is still a kind of case or "house" for something. It's a "protruding case" worn on the body.
ReplyDeleteIn "sasa" = "Japanese bamboo", total reduplication is used to convey a collective sense, as in "yama yama" = "lots of mountains", "ie ie" = "every household", "iro iro" = "every color" i.e. "wide variety".
ReplyDeleteSo, "sasa" = "lots of poles", "collection of rods", "trunks everywhere," "shoots upon shoots", and so on. Cuz running bamboo species like that erupt in dense impenetrable forests, not isolated trees.
More Japanese "sa" words of Yeniseian "ɬa" origin. "Sasu" has a whole bunch of meanings, and they fall into two groups.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%95%E3%81%99#Etymology_1
One is "sandbar, shoal", which is an extension or protrusion of sand from the main beach or shoreline out into the open water, sometimes forming a peninsula of sand and sometimes stretching out all the way to connect to another land area, forming a sand-bridge.
The second syllable "su" may be of Chinese origin, also meaning "sandbar", but at any rate the first syllable is of Japonic origin, and ultimately Yeniseian, having to do with "extension, protrusion".
Second, a series of cognate words that all involve extending a bodily appendage -- "pierce, stab, stick, thrust, (insect) sting / bite," "to point at", "to raise one's hand", "to shine into", and "to insert". The second syllable is a dummy verb ending -- a rare ending, "-su", but the preferred endings are already taken by "saru" ("to leave") and "saku" ("to bloom").
The verbs under "sasu" include references to "hand", which is part of the polysemy of the Yeniseian and Athabaskan forms. Another connection between them and Japonic.
ReplyDeleteI don't discount "saru" = "to leave" and "saku" = "to bloom" from connecting to "sa-" = "extension, protrusion". The most common physical gesture for "leave" is extending the hand / pointer finger to point outward from the place where you are. And the blossoming of a plant involves little protrusions or extensions growing outward from the branch.
ReplyDeleteNext is the P-Y suffix "-ɬaw", also reconstructed as "-ɬa", and deriving from the prefix meaning "extension".
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Yeniseian/-%C9%ACaw
One meaning is an emphatic suffix, perhaps deriving from the gesture of using the arm / hand / pointer finger to point or stab into the air for emphasis.
This has two related descendants in Japonic, "sa" and "zo" (from earlier "so"). Phonetically, "sa" is the straightforward carry-over of "ɬa", while "so" -> "zo" is the carry-over of "ɬaw", where codas are not allowed, turn into vowels, and replace the nuclear vowel. "W" turns into a back rounded vowel, but sometimes it's "u" and sometimes it's "o". Here, it's "o".
I haven't kept track, but I think "w" changes to "o" after nuclear "a", and changes to "u" after "e", "i", "o", and of course "u". So, it's the relatively higher vowel "u" after the non-low vowels, and the relatively lower vowel "o" after the low vowel "a", an assimilation for height.
Semantically, "sa" in Japanese is a sentence-final emphatic particle, and "zo" (from "so") is a vowel-alternated form of it as well. "Zo" is stronger than "sa", and can be used after a word for emphasis, not only at the end of a sentence. There's also "ze", derived from "zo" with a softening suffix "-e". All ultimately trace back to the Yeniseian emphatic suffix.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%95#Etymology_4
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%9E#Etymology_2
The other meaning of the P-Y suffix is diminuitive, and the example cited is a suffix used to derive "dew, dewy" ("xurɬaw") from "wet, moist" ("xur"). This seems like a more concrete form of the root it's attached to -- although "wet" is physical, it's a bit more abstract than "dew", a concrete example rather than a broad category.
Another role of the "-sa" suffix in Japanese is "-ness", e.g. "sadness" ("kanashii + sa") from "sad" ("kanashii"). It's contrasted with a similar suffix "-mi" in that "-sa" is more concrete and objective while "-mi" is more abstract and subjective. Nice match to the Yeniseian usage.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%95#Etymology_3
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%BF#Etymology_4
Reminder from earlier, I showed that P-J "supa" (later "suba") = "lip, tongue" is a carry-over of P-Y "ɬVb" = "tongue". As usual, no evidence for a medial nasal in the Japonic word (contra its listing as "sunpa" in Wiktionary), probably re-analyzed later as a compound and rendaku applied to the "p".
ReplyDeleteThis may or may not relate to the protrusion root in Yeniseian, since the vowels aren't always "a" in the descendants -- they're also "u" and "e", all over the place. And in the Japonic carry-over, it's "u" rather than "a". Semantically, the tongue can be extended, but the lips not really (unless you consider "pucker" or "purse" a protrusion, but it's far weaker than sticking out the tongue).
This further establishes the sound correspondence between P-Y "ɬ" and P-J "s", not only relating to that one productive root about "extension".
Now for some body and gender words, beginning with "i" in Japonic. First up, P-Y "ɢojq" = "bile, gall", and P-J "i" = "gallbladder". Very close semantic match.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Yeniseian/%C9%A2ojq
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/i
Phonetically, this is another case of "ɢ" being deleted altogether rather than altered when carrying over into Japonic. The "j" changes into "i" and replaces the nuclear "o".
So far, we've seen "q" become "y" in Japonic, although that was only initially. Here, it would be a coda and need a dummy vowel after it, yielding "iyV".
However, it seems like this form was avoided for the same reason that "yi" was illegal from the start -- dissimilating "y" from "i". There are no native Japonic words, that have 2 moras a la the canonical word shape, of the form "iyV". The closest one is "iya" as an onomatopoeia for disgust or disbelief, like "yuck" in English. Perhaps even this Japanese exclamation comes from "i" = "gallbladder", a gross internal organ.
Aside from the exclamation, the only word of the form "iyV" is where there is no vowel, and therefore the "y" was dropped as well to prevent coda consonants -- the very word "i" = "gallbladder".
This word is highly unusual since it's a standalone word, and not from a closed class category like personal pronouns, that is a bare vowel in Japonic. It's rare enough for a word to begin with a bare vowel, but just about impossible for the entire word to be a bare vowel, except for personal pronouns.
Examining its Yeniseian lineage, though, we see that it did not always begin with a vowel -- it began with "ɢ" -- and it did not always consist of one mora, it probably tried to keep the "y" (from P-Y coda "q") and append a dummy vowel, but that just sounded wrong since "i" was followed by "y", violating the dissimilation of those two sounds in Japonic.
So, it remained as simply "i" in Japonic.
Japanese also uses a gross internal organ for an exclamation meaning "gross, disgusting, yuck" -- "kimoi", from "kimo" = "liver". So perhaps "iya" derives from "i" = "gallbladder" in the same way. Still, more of an exlamation than a productive root word like "i".
ReplyDeletePotential Yeniseian origin of Japonic word for "placenta", although it's "egg" in Yeniseian. The word for "egg" in Japanese is much later and morphologically complex ("tamago", from earlier "tama + ko"), which seems strange -- why wouldn't such a basic word like "egg" carry over? Well, maybe it did but applied in a slightly different way, to mean "placenta", still referring to female reproductive organs and materials.
ReplyDeleteThere are 2 words for "egg" in P-Y, the common "ej" and the less common "ɢajnč".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Yeniseian/ej#Etymology_2
"Ej" should turn "j" to "i", which replaces nuclear "e", yielding "i". However, some of the personal pronouns showed that for Yeniseian words with no onset, just a nuclear vowel and a single coda, sometimes just the nuclear vowel carried over into Japonic and the coda was simply deleted. So that also allows for simply "e". Hard to distinguish these two -- a bare high/front vowel.
I actually think "i" could be the result of "ɢajnč" as well -- "ɢ" deletes, "j" -> "i" which replaces "a", and the complex coda cluster is simply thrown out. It would require 2 dummy vowels to break it up and avoid codas, yielding a 3-vowel / 3-mora word in Japonic, when they prefer 2-mora words. But I don't think this happened -- this harder-to-pronounce word just failed to carry over, and only "ej" did, as either "e" or "i".
And indeed that's what Frellesvig posits as the P-J word for "placenta" -- "e", later raised to "i".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%83%9E#Old_Japanese
The "i" form serves as a base for the related P-J terms "iro" and "ira", both meaning "shared kinship through the same mother". So, it was not a technical anatomy term, like "Um, ackshually, the placenta is distinct from the egg that it supports and nourishes..." It was used as a part-for-the-whole figure of speech to refer to the womb and pregnancy and gestation.
Is it any less accurate to say that two people share kinship through the same mother due to coming from the same "egg" vs. the same "placenta"? Both are figures of speech to refer to the "womb".
The phonetics are a little unclear on how the P-Y -> P-J carry-over would work, but then the phonetic nature of the target word in P-J is also unclear in the exact same way, "e" vs. "i".
And the semantics are not perfect, but a fairly transparent shift from one salient part or piece of the womb to another salient part or piece of it.
Japonic words with "-m-" meaning "female" are Yeniseian in origin, from "-m". I missed this generalization when I looked at gender and kin terms during the comment thread of the August post, cuz P-Y "pun" = "daughter" threw me off, since it ends in "-n". But supposedly this used to be "-m", which is shared with "am" = "mother" (whose carry-over into Japonic I explained in that earlier thread), and "ɢejm" = "woman".
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Yeniseian/-m
I'll look at a new female word in Japonic which has this "-m-", "imo" = "close female companion, sister". Its entry at Wiktionary lists some of the other "-m-" female words, like "me", "mi", "mo", that appear in various contexts.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%A6%B9#Japanese
This is a phonetic and semantic match, with the only difference being the presence of a dummy vowel in Japonic to avoid coda consonants. QED.
Now onto the new discovery, that OJ "imo" (and in P-J as well?) is carried over from Yeniseian. It comes from P-Y "ɢejm" = "woman". The "ɢ" deletes, "j" -> "i" which replaces the nuclear vowel, and this time the coda consonant is preserved, with a dummy vowel after it. The most common "m" syllable in OJ is "mo", so that's what was chosen, yielding "imo". QED.
Similar to the carry-over of P-Y "am" -> P-J "amo" (both "mother"), including the preservation of the P-Y coda consonant.
I've said that morphologically complex words from P-Y don't carry over into P-J -- only single morphemes. These two and other simple kin and personal pronouns seem to be an exception. P-Y "am" breaks down into "a + m", and "ɢejm" breaks down into "ɢej + m". I've shown that all 3 of those separate morphemes, "a" = "kin term root", "ɢej" = "big", and "-m" = "female", carried over from Yeniseian into Japonic.
But now there are examples of a complex P-Y word carrying over!
I think the solution is primarily phonological rather than morphological. These words carried over in complex form due to their phonological shape of having an optional onset, 1 nuclear vowel, optional coda glide, and coda consonant.
That is, they don't have 2 nuclear vowels, since one of the morphemes is a bare consonant, "-m". When it combines with a standard 1-vowel word, the complex result still has only 1 vowel, 1 syllable (the bare consonant morpheme is not syllabic). So it's still shaped like a standard standalone word in Yeniseian.
If you just looked at "am" or "ɢejm", would you guess that they're complex? They look pretty simple to me -- and they must have to speakers during the Yeniseian-to-Japonic transition stage. If they're complex, where's the 2nd vowel? Doesn't every morpheme have to have a vowel? No, not every one, but most do. So when a morpheme *doesn't* have a vowel, and it attaches to another morpheme that does have 1 vowel, the complex combination sneaks through the detector as a "single" word.
Neat!
Finally for now, Japonic words for "male" with "wo" are Yeniseian, from "-b" (male noun class marker, akin to "-m" for female).
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Yeniseian/-b
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/wo
You'd think the "b" would devoice to "p", but in this case it preserved voicing and bilabial place and softened its manner into "w". The most common "w" syllable in OJ is "wo", and that's what was chosen. QED.
I gave another example earlier where P-Y "b" became P-J "w" instead of "p" -- "tail". In P-Y, there's a root "bu-" shared among words relating to lower-body appendages. It softened "b" into "w", although retaining the "u" would result in an illegal "wu" syllable in Japonic, so it was altered to the nearest vowel, yielding "wo", which is the P-J / OJ word for "tail".
So the "b" -> "w" instead of "p" for "male" is not unprecedented.
Just want to say, how grateful I am to Japanese vtubers, not only for sparking my curiosity about a specific word to investigate, but for being so full of energy, eagerness, and devotion to their calling. It's not just a job or source of money for them -- they're really committed to it, and enjoy it.
ReplyDeleteThat motivates me to do my best in my own efforts of discovering and exploring secret passageways and sharing buried treasure with the world. It's obviously not a source of money for me, it's a devotion to a higher cause -- and being in the (online) presence of Japanese vtubers helps to keep me inspired about pursuing higher causes, giving your best effort, and so on, as an end in itself, not just to make money or chase clout.
Clueless non-Japanese people think it's due to a pathological Japanese workaholic materialist status contest. It's not "workaholic" if you're full of energy and need to spend it in some productive or creative way! It's certainly not materialist if you're not earning big bucks from it, and only the top streamers make lots of money. Japanese vtubers who are not in the super-duper top-tier are doing it *despite* not making tons of money -- devotion to a higher cultural cause.
They are shrine maidens of the modern era, just like I am a cliff-dwelling sage of the modern era. We're not so different! ^_^
The Japanese phrase "ganbatte!" meaning "do your best!" is not a workaholic or materialist slogan. It means don't waste your energy, use it productively and creatively. And use it to benefit some group you belong to, share it with others -- rather than to benefit only yourself.
ReplyDeleteIt's the opposite of the American slogans of today like "rise and grind," "hustle", etc. Those are all begging you to use your energy in wasteful and parasitic ways, just to benefit yourself in terms of money and status.
"Ganbatte!" used to have an American counterpart back in the good ol' days. In fact, one of them was "let's hustle!" or "all right, men, let's show some hustle!" But it was used by the gym coach meaning, "use your energy to help out the team, so they can achieve their goal", not "find a way to cheat and score an easy win for yourself". It's sick how that word has flipped its meaning within my lifetime.
As social cohesion has come unglued in America, but remained fairly strong in Japan, only one of our cultures today uses a phrase meaning "work hard" in a pro-social way, while the other culture has debased it into a parasite striver slogan.
It's really refreshing, and encouraging, to see the energetic team spirit still alive in Glorious Nippon, no matter where you look -- yes, even vtubers! ^_^
That's not to say that every team is always working at 100% in Japan, but they're far more cohesive and group-oriented than we are in America these days.
This has nothing to do with Japan per se or America per se -- during the civil wars of the Yamato era, or of the Sengoku era, Japanese people were far more selfish and stingy with their personal energy. And as recently as the New Deal era in America, we were VERY energetic and team-spirited. We were a comical extreme of the "Rah-rah! Sis, boom, bah!" super-organism.
Now no one here gives a shit about anything, and that is a negative feedback to those remaining few who of us who *do* give a shit.
It's necessary to find some external source of inspiration, in that case, when it's so lacking and outright hostile toward "giving a shit" in your once-glorious homeland...
Let Kami-sama bless the modern shrine maidens who have become Japanese vtubers! ^_^
Quick Yeniseian - Japonic etymology for today, to keep up the pace for Nonstop Nihongo New Year's. ^_^
ReplyDeleteI think I found a doublet -- two Japonic words from the same Yeniseian source, but which have different sounds and have diverged somewhat in meaning.
P-Y "quwç" means "birch bark tent," what Americans would call "wigwam".
P-J "ya" meant "house" in a physical sense, like the roof over people's heads, the building or structure, and has shifted to refer to an establishment of a certain type -- like "shop", as in "cake shop", a building where cakes are made, and from there, the occupation of someone who works in such a shop, like "-er" in English ("baker" from "bake + -r").
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/ya#Etymology_2
P-J "utui" meant "interior" of a building, not the structure itself, and has shifted to be a more abstract word for "within" or "among" or "during". It's even become a (female) personal pronoun, like referring to oneself by way of the household or domestic interior.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/utui
"Ya" is more concrete, "utui" (modern "uchi") is more abstract, one about the structure and the other about the interior. But they're clearly related semantically.
But are they related phonetically, and from the same source? That would make them a doublet. I think so -- both are attempts to render P-Y "quwç" in P-J phonotactics.
Usually P-Y "q" becomes "y" in P-J, so "ya" is the attempt to preserve the consonant, albeit in altered form, while not worrying about the original vowel. It gets a dummy vowel, and the most common "y" syllable in OJ is "ya", so it's "ya".
Since "q" is a difficult consonant, another solution is to drop it and preserve what else you can. The nuclear "u", as well as the coda "w" becoming "u" and replacing the nuclear vowel, both yield "u" as the initial vowel in this solution.
The coda "ç" should want to become "s", but that would result in homophony with "usi" (since "si" is the most common "s" syllable in OJ), an existing P-J word meaning "cow". And given the importance of cows to Steppe cultures, that would be a big no-no.
So the other consonant that is voiceless and coronal, albeit not a fricative or continuant, is "t". That root is already taken by a verb "ut-" meaning "hit, beat, strike", but since it's a different part of speech, this homophony is not so bad -- and it's not homophony with a sacred animal like the cow.
As for the dummy vowel it receives, the most common "t" syllable in OJ is "ta", yielding "uta" -- but that would conflict with "uta" = "song". Supposedly in P-J "song" was "ota", and saw vowel-raising to make it "uta". Perhaps that raising was already occurring, and that blocked "uta" = "interior". The next most common "t" syllable is "to", yielding "uto" -- and in the Yamagata dialect today (in the East / North of Honshu), it is indeed "uto":
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%86%E3%81%A8
The next most common after that is "utu", which is what was chosen -- or perhaps there was some earlier stage where it was "uto", which survived in the Yamagata dialect, and then saw vowel raising on the 2nd syllable to make it "utu". The final "i" in P-J is the typical vowel-alternating 2nd element (in this case, the 2nd "u" is the main element in the alternating pair).
I expect quite a bit of these doublets, since much of the Yeniseian phoneme inventory, and syllable structure, is problematic for Japonic -- so there could have been multiple attempts to render the source when carrying it over into Japonic. That would be most notable for the really exotic consonants like "q", "χ", "kʷ", etc.
ReplyDeleteSaved from alienation by the Brothaman again! I'm telling you, this keeps happening more and more frequently -- major vibe shift among African-Americans (descendants of slaves, not "any ol' melanated body with African DNA").
ReplyDeleteI had to go out for a few things tonight, and during an otherwise alienating trip, an African-American guy stopped me in the supermarket to say, "I have that *exact same* coat!" He had a surprised look, and gave a little friendly smile and chuckle.
It was a tan duffle coat by Gloverall (made in England), all wool including the wool liner, heavy and roomy, hooded, with leather and horn toggles (as in, cone-shaped full horns). Although British in origin, it's still an iconic look for American culture -- some of the really cool stuff from the Olde Worlde, we preserved. And duffle coats are one of them.
He was not gay, not a fashion victim, not a Talented Tenth yuppie striver. Just an ordinary Gen-X black guy. They've been assimilating to heritage American norms for generations, with some exceptions (mainly their given names, which sharply diverged starting IIRC with Gen X). So of course he has a standard piece of American drip.
Non-Americans will never come up and exclaim things like this to me -- cuz they don't dress like me, cuz they're foreigners. They wouldn't even recognize it as iconic Americana. It's just some random thing they don't understand, not that they hate it, it just doesn't register and resonate with them.
But this stuff MOST DEFINITELY resonates with the other big heritage American demo.
It's an in-group sartorial shibboleth. Just like the language we're speaking -- another reason why foreigners would never approach me all friendly-like and say, "Hey, I have that too!" They literally don't speak our language, and I don't speak theirs.
But good ol' African-Americans speak nothing but American English, so he didn't even hesitate, like "Hmmm, does this guy speak my language or not...?"
It's the most refreshing and reassuring thing in the world to just be able to interact spontaneously with supposed strangers in a friendly way in public spaces. It's nearly impossible anymore!
And like I said before, white Gen-X Americans have burrowed into their little domestic cocoons, whether they're married and have kids or not, since at least the 2000s. I never seem them out and about. I'm one of the very few from my demo who does -- and even though they're a minority, the only generation-mates I ever run into, let alone have friendly interactions with among strangers, are African-American.
In a nation increasingly flooded with foreigners, we can both look at each other like Riggs and Murtaugh, and sigh, "...I'm gettin' too old fo' dis shiiiit..." If you're not American, look up that reference, and watch it -- it's an American classic! ^_^
Now looking to Tlingit, from the Na-Dene family, instead of Yeniseian, for Japonic connections. Yeniseian and Na-Dene are distantly related, and some words from their common ancestor will be in Na-Dene but not Yeniseian -- but Japonic, at least the Wa people's language, traces back to that common ancestor as well (in part). So, there will be Japonic words that are not easily traced to Yeniseian, but are traced to Na-Dene -- ultimately from the Dene-Yeniseian ancestor.
ReplyDeleteThe name of Japan's capital, Tokyo, used to be Edo -- but it was really Yedo, and it breaks down into "ye + to" meaning "bay + portal". "Bay" in OJ was "ye", although eventually the "y" was lost before "e", so now it's just "e".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%B1%9F#Japanese
We've seen P-Y "q" becoming P-J "y", likewise "q" from the Na-Dene or Athabaskan side of the Pacific Ocean. So, "ye" would have come from something like "qe"...
Whaddaya know? Tlingit "g̱eey", where the initial consonant is "q" but written as "g" with an underline, since in Tlingit the consonant series contrasts plain, aspirated, and ejective -- not voiced and voiceless.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/g%CC%B1eey
I didn't find any close phonetic or semantic matches in the P-Y list, probably cuz Yeniseian speakers were not near the ocean, and so didn't have need for a large body of inland water. Perhaps the same reason why there are seemingly no other good matches on the Na-Dene side, like Eyak. But Tlingit is spoken in Southeastern Alaska, so they have a big need for words like "bay".
And so does Glorious Nippon -- at least, the major islands that speak Japanese. I couldn't find a Ryukyuan word for "bay".
Nevertheless, a perfect semantic match, and a close phonetic match -- with the only alteration being a fairly widely demonstrated one between Yeniseian / Na-Dene and Japonic, with "q" -> "y" (at least initially).
I do feel bad as an American, always studying Olde Worlde cultures, neglecting the ones in the land where I actually live. So it's nice to have a way to branch out and connect the two -- and just as the Japanese are the cool Asians, the Na-Dene are the cool Indians. I wouldn't expect any less of a connection. ^_^
To clarify the relationship between Japonic, Yeniseian, and Na-Dene, it seems like there was a common ancestor between Japonic and Yeniseian in the 1st or 2nd millennium BC. Japonic split off from it sometime in the late 1st millennium BC, as they joined the Xiongnu confederation and then headed off into the Korean peninsula and then the Japanese islands, absorbing speakers of Emishi / Ainu, during Japan's Yayoi era.
ReplyDeleteNa-Dene speakers left the Olde Worlde several millennia earlier.
So when I say Japonic carried over something from Yeniseian, maybe I should say it's carrying over from the common ancestor that Japonic shares with Yeniseian. Call that ancestor Wa-Yeniseian, since the Wa people brought their language into Japan, where it synthesized with Emishi to yield Japonic.
Or maybe we can talk about "Para"-Yeniseian languages, like Para-Mongolic. Proto-Mongolic only goes back to the times of Genghiz Khan, more or less, but there were languages related to it going further back into the 1st millennium BC, like Xianbei. Those are labelled Para-Mongolic.
If Proto-Yeniseian only goes back to the 1st millennium AD, or a bit before then, then Para-Yeniseian languages go back even earlier into the 1st and 2nd millennia BC. That's where the Steppe ancestor to Japonic lies (and the Emishi ancestor lies in Southern Korea and Japan).
That Para-Yeniseian language was clearly similar to Yeniseian, but in some ways it would have resembled Na-Dene more than Yeniseian. That's where Japonic gets its features that are more Na-Dene-like than Yeniseian-like.
For example, while browsing the P-Y list, I sometimes find a correspondence of P-Y "q" and P-J "p" -- but I've already said the main correspondence there is "q" and "y". How could "q" correspond to "p"?
Well, like the labialized velars in P-Y becoming labials in P-J -- except "q" isn't labialized, so how could that feature resolve into a primarily labial consonant? If P-Y "q" isn't the end of the line of ancestry -- and it used to be a labialized uvular, during the Para-Yeniseian era. In fact, Na-Dene languages have labialized uvulars, not just velars.
So by examining the Na-Dene side, we can triangulate. If P-ND "qʷ" reflects P-Dene-Wa-Yeniseian "qʷ", the labialization has clearly been lost in P-Y. But not necessarily in P-Wa-Yeniseian. If Japonic is carrying over / resolving problems from that Para-Yeniseian stage, then it may very well have been dealing with labialized uvulars, not only velars.
And that would result in a correspondence between P-Y "q" and P-J "p" -- despite the expected correspondences being "q" and "y", and "velar ʷ" and "p". That's cuz P-Y "q" forks back to two distinct consonants in Para-Yeniseian, and further back into Dene-Wa-Yeniseian -- it could reflect earlier "q" or "qʷ".
Obviously the best way to show that would be not only finding correspondences between P-Y "q" and P-J "p", but also "qʷ" somewhere in the Na-Dene family. That would clinch the connection between a primary vs. secondary labial consonant, whereas the "q" and "p" connection is not so motivated on its own.
2026 is gonna be another busy but exciting year for my revived interest in linguistics, which I majored in during undergrad... nice to see it being put to some productive and original, insightful use. ^_^
Japonic "ya" and "utui" may not be doublets, if "utui" is missing an initial consonant cuz it used to be "G" -- which simply gets deleted in Japonic, not altered into "y" or anything else. The initial consonant is "q" in P-Y, but this may be a case where the Japonic form is descended from the Para-Yeniseian stage, where it was "G", not the Yeniseian stage, where it devoiced / merged into "q".
ReplyDeleteIf that's the case, then "ya" is from some other source, not an attempt to preserve the initial consonant of P-Y "quwç".
So now we see a new form of triangulation -- not just using Na-Dene to inform Japonic, but using Japonic to inform Yeniseian history.
Ideally, there would be a Na-Dene word similar to P-Y "quwç", but with initial "G" instead, and with a related meaning. I couldn't quickly find an example, though, among P-ND or P-Athabaskan or Eyak or Tlingit...
BTW, needless to say, there are no other potential candidates for the Japanese word for "bay" ("ye"), among other language families. Not Chinese, Korean, Austronesian (lol), or whatever else. It has no etymology listed at Wiktionary.
ReplyDeleteSo far, Tlingit "g̱eey" is the only plausible candidate. As a single etymology, it's not super-convincing, but in the broader context of the correspondence between Japonic "y" and Yeniseian or Na-Dene "q", it's believable.
So many Japanese traditions flourishing during New Year's! Vivi began her Medieval fantasy journey by playing Dragon Quest I! She's not a video game addict, she just likes being part of Japanese cultural traditions, and that includes JRPGs that have been recommended to her by Peko-chan. ^_^
ReplyDeleteThe official Hololive New Year Countdown had an IRL video featuring milking cows and eating horse meat -- just like their glorious Steppe ancestors! ^_^
Raden took her audience on another IRL tour of Japanese art!
And Guutara dressed up in traditional Chinese clothing and accessories! Not Japanese, but there was one item that was VERY Steppe-looking to my eyes... I'll have to save that for a later post! I had been thinking this matter over for awhile, but seeing that object gave me an epiphany today! It finally explains the origin of canvas paintings in Europe! Yep, that didn't come from nowhere... it must have come from the Orient, ultimately the Steppe. But that will have to wait until later, with lots more details to put together.
I really luv Guu-chan's vlogs, they always shine a light on some important part of Japanese cultural origins coming from the Steppe. Like when she went on a casual stroll while holding a large bird of prey on her arm, wearing a falconry gauntlet. ^_^
Traditions are important to keep alive -- not only to fulfill your duty, but because they're FUN and EXCITING!
Also, I saw Kson post a picture of a pot of soba noodle stew that her dad made for her on New Year's -- such a daddy's girl, very adorable moment. ^_^
P-J "kati" = "walking, on foot" has an Eastern OJ variant "kasi". The subtle variation in the 2nd C suggests two attempts to resolve a consonant that was not present in P-J's phoneme inventory, like "ts" or "c" (English "ch").
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/kati
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%BE%92#Japanese
Pretty close -- P-Y "kajš" = "foot, leg", with cognates in the Na-Dene family as well (and whose final consonant is also "š" -- Eyak "kˀahš" and Tlingit "xʼaash").
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Yeniseian/kaj%C5%A1
The Eastern OJ variant is closer to the Yeniseian / Dene original, with the sibilant, and then getting the expected dummy vowel (since "si" is the most common "s" syllable in OJ).
The Western OJ variant, which became the standard, hardened that consonant into "t", and even then chose an unusual dummy vowel -- "ti" is the *least* common "t" syllable in OJ. That suggests that it derived from the Eastern OJ variant, whose dummy vowel is expected and whose consonant alteration is the most transparent.
So, in Western OJ, altering the 2nd C from Eastern OJ didn't involve altering the dummy 2nd vowel along with it. The creation of the word-final dummy vowel slot, and the choice of which dummy vowel to use there, was made during the P-J stage.
That's why there's a totally unexpected dummy vowel for the Western OJ form -- it derived from an earlier form where the dummy vowel *was* expected, but the 2nd C was different.
And given the cognates with Yeniseian and Na-Dene, that means the P-J form is not actually "kati" but "kasi".
Wiktionary lists "kati" as the P-Ryukyuan form as well -- but that has a totally unrelated meaning, "to win", from P-J "katu". If it also meant "walking, on foot", then that would place more weight on the P-J form being "kati", but since its meaning is unrelated, the only relevant forms are Western OJ "kati", Eastern OJ "kasi", and the P-Y and P-ND forms, which also have a sibilant in the 2nd C slot.
So, P-J must've been "kasi", and Western OJ / modern standard Japanese innovated the "t" in place of "s".
The only wrinkle is the 1st vowel, which is "a" in P-J, but "a" followed by "j" in P-Y. Normally, we expect "j" -> "i" and replace the nuclear vowel, yielding "kisi". Even if we allow for the low "a" to affect the height of its replacement glide, that would still yield "kesi". But it stayed "a".
ReplyDeletePossibly, "a" is just more resistant to alteration compared to the non-low vowels. We've already seen that it affects its replacement by "w" -- it's "o" instead of "u" for non-low vowels. P-J doesn't like "e" in general, especially in 1st V position -- almost no words of an open class begin with "e" in P-J. So instead of pulling down the height from expected "i" to "e", it's pulled all the way down to "a".
This doesn't happen across the board -- the very first clue I had of the Yeniseian origins of Japonic was P-Y "xʷaj" = "sun, day, sun goddess" = P-J "pi". Maybe it varies based on there being a coda consonant after the glide, which "xʷaj" does not have, but "kajš" does have. This is an open question to be solved later after further exploration.
In any case, the southern branch of Yeniseian has the "a" vowel instead of "i", so perhaps Wa / Japonic specifically branched off from a Pumpokolic dialect, which is where the Xiongnu confederation was based -- not way up in the north.
Also, the Na-Dene forms don't have an "i" or "j", just "ah" and "aa". So perhaps the Para-Yeniseian ancestor of the P-J form simply had "a" like the P-ND form, and P-Y innovated by sticking a "j" after the "a".
Whatever the reason turns out to be, there are several plausible explanations for the P-J form having "a" instead of expected "i". That vowel difference isn't enough to discount the otherwise major phonetic match -- including the coda consonant, which we're not always lucky enough to find -- and perfect semantic match, and the broad geographic / temporal range of the cognates. Not just Yeniseian, but Na-Dene as well. ^_^
Correction: Wiktionary does list severarl Ryukyuan cognates of Western OJ "kati" = "walking, on foot", not just "to win", on the hiragana page for "kati", though not on their P-R reconstruction of "kati".
ReplyDeleteSo it's possible the P-J form is "kati"... but I still doubt it, based on that least-common dummy vowel, which is there in all the Ryukyuan forms as well. All else equal, 2 independent innovations is less believable than 1, but in this case the rest of the picture justifies it. Or the P-R form is borrowed from Western OJ, which was the sole innovation from the Proto form.
In either case, the variation in the 2nd C still suggests an attempt to resolve a consonant that isn't present in P-J, but was in the source. And the "š" in the P-Y and P-ND forms works for that purpose.
Major revelation on Japonic phonotactics -- why is there a ban on coda consonants, why is there an obligatory 2-mora / 2-vowel morpheme structure, etc.?
ReplyDeleteIt's not so much that coda consonants were banned -- it's that there was an obligatory creation of a 2nd vowel slot, which changed the nature of the previous 2nd C, from coda to onset.
But it's the creation of that 2nd V slot that is fundamental, the ban on coda consonants merely follows from an obligatory 2nd V.
If a ban on coda consonants was fundamental, then the default morpheme shape could just as easily have been CV from earlier CVC. But it went the other way -- CVCV from earlier CVC.
It finally hit me today -- the creation of that dummy vowel slot was meant to accomodate the profound loss of information from the 2nd C, which resulted from the Yeniseian -> Japonic transition. Yeniseian, and Na-Dene even more so, are RICH in consonants, including in coda position. P-J is IMPOVERISHED in consonants -- maybe only 1/2 as many, at best.
Lost information from consonants wants to be reincarnated onto surviving adjacent vowels. This is what happened with tonogenesis throughout Southeast Asia during the Dark Ages, and the related phenomenon of diphthongization in Khmer, all of which was triggered by loss of coda consonants. Info about those lost consonants reincarnated in the form of tones (or diphthongs) on the preceding surviving vowel.
Also the loss of Latin nasal coda consonants in some Romance languages (French, Portuguese), which was reincarnated onto the preceding vowel, which became a nasalized vowel, contrasting with non-nasalized vowels.
OK, during the Yeniseian -> Japonic transition, coda consonants are not dropping out altogether, but their variety is, which requires mergers or catch-all containers, severly reducing the number of consonants that appear in coda position, creating the homophony from hell problem.
So why didn't Japonic just reincarnate that lost info about consonants onto the preceding surviving vowel, a la the other families just discussed? Why did they create an entirely new vowel position *after* the coda consonant, where the lost consonantal info could be reincarnated?
ReplyDeleteAha! Cuz the exact same major reduction in consonants was also happening in the onset consonant position! That was not the case in Southeast Asian or Romance languages -- their onsets stayed more or less the same. Maybe they altered from one consonant to another, but the entire position of "onset consonant" did not vanish, nor was their number slashed in half. In those cases, only 1 consonant slot was getting the axe, and therefore only 1 vowel slot was needed to accomodate that lost information.
However, in Japonic, both the onset and coda consonants were getting slashed in half, and with only 1 nuclear vowel to accomodate the "refugees" from both sides, it was not enough territory. That 1 vowel would've needed to come in 47 different flavors -- too complicated, based on where they already were, at around 5 or so.
So instead, the solution was to open up an entirely new expanse of vowel territory, not by enriching the vowel inventory (with tones, diphthongs, nasality, etc.), but by creating an obligatory 2nd V slot after the former coda consonant.
In this way, the vowel inventory can stay mostly the same (maybe adding 1 or 2 new ones compatible with the existing feature set, but not a whole new feature like tone, nasality, etc.). And now, the lost info from the 1st C will get reincarnated onto the 1st V, while the lost info from the 2nd C will get reincarnated onto the new 2nd V. The 2 consonant slots are no longer fighting over the same vowel slot to reincarnate in!
Now, that doesn't mean that the lost info from the consonants will be completely phonetically motivated. Maybe the phonetic "motivation" is arbitrary. But that doesn't matter -- as long as there is something close to a 1-to-1 mapping from the old and new forms, it makes the transition transparent to both the native speakers and new speakers.
It's *ideal* if the mapping is phonetically motivated. But even if it's not, at least a 1-to-1 mapping that's arbitrary will still preserve all the lost info -- just not in the most sensorily natural way.
But preservation of lost info, and avoiding homophony / confusion, is the most important goal. Smooth sensory transition comes second.
Of course, I haven't totally mapped out the results of this transition, as scholars of Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Romance, etc. have done for those transitions.
ReplyDeleteBut I just KNOW this is what happened, and why there's such an obsession with 2 vowels / 2 moras in Japonic. It was attempting to preserve lost info from CVC in Yeniseian (and/or Na-Dene), but since both C's were being reduced in number, they couldn't both fight over a single V -- so open up a whole new world with obligatory CVCV shape.
Jaan! ^_^
Somehow, nature always finds a way...
Let me say how grateful I am that I focused on (morpho-)phonology, rather than syntax and semantics during my undergrad major! Syntax is such a major waste of time, it's gone nowhere, and so much of it may be a real-time processing matter anyway, not a matter of tree-structure rules per se.
ReplyDeleteThe only good part of semantics was lexical semantics, which gets at morphology anyway -- decomposing the meaning of the whole from the meaning of the parts and their arrangement.
How semantics interfaces with syntax was also super-boring and pointless.
And only (morpho-)phonology has any broader range of applications, like historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, orthography, deciphering scripts, learning new languages without an accent, poetry / songs, and so on.
It's not like I was steered toward phonology, I just naturally liked it more than syntax. It's more corporeal, less cerebral. And more social-cultural than autistic in its applications.
And my syntax / semantics professor was more into lexical semantics anyway, so I didn't have to suffer through those topics.
It was a pretty sweet subject to major in, looking back on it. ^_^
Plenty more to come for Non-stop Nihongo New Year, just gotta catch my breath for a bit! And from outside language / linguistics, inspired by the New Year rituals in Glorious Nippon... and elsewhere. ^_^
ReplyDeleteAnd of course that thing about where canvas paintings come from -- the Steppe! Siberia, at any rate. And appearing on the other side of the Northern Pacific, with our good ol' cousins the Na-Dene people. ^_^
I'm excited for the New Year! ^_^
Addendum on "kati" ending in "i" -- the P-Y and P-ND forms are nouns, "leg, foot". But the P-J form is more like an adverb, "walking, on foot", judging from the two quotations from OJ that Wiktionary cites.
ReplyDeleteThat makes an "i" ending more plausible, if it's the stem / continuative form of a verb "katu" = "to travel on foot". That is exactly the case for "katu" = "to win" and "kati" = "winning, victory". But the verb is not attested for "to travel on foot".
Well, maybe it's more like the "-i" suffix for adjectives, describing a form of travel -- akin to "walk-y" in English. If it were added onto a noun, "katV", no matter what that dummy vowel is, adding "-i" would result in "kati" since vowel sequences are not allowed, and the 2nd replaces the 1st.
Or perhaps the "i" was chosen at the time of coinage, to make it sound more like an adjective or continuative form, without also coining the verb "katu". Again, that verb is not attested with the meaning "to travel on foot", only this "kati" form that is possibly a noun but used more like an adverb.
That explains why the highly unusual vowel was chosen -- it was not a pure dummy vowel, and therefore not chosen based on frequency. It was meant to carry meaning, namely and "-i" adjective or continuative verb stem.
Another possibility, getting back to the function of the 2nd vowel being to reincarnate lost info from the coda consonant -- maybe "i" was chosen as a reincarnation of the place of articulation of the coda.
ReplyDeleteIn P-Y and P-ND, the coda is "š", which is post-alveolar, not dental or alveolar like "t". How could that be re-encoded? Maybe a segment to suggest a palatal place of articulation, like "y" ("j"). Except that's a consonant or 2nd-dary feature, and that's not allowed in Japonic.
OK, turn it into a vowel instead -- "y" ("j") becomes "i".
That is, "kati" is signaling that the P-Y source was something like "kat", but the coda was not exactly "t" -- it was more "i"-like, i.e. further toward the palate, like "š" or "c" or "ts".
If the P-Y source truly had a "t" (or "d", since P-J is also devoicing voiced obstruents), then this "kat" would get an expected default dummy vowel, either "o2" or "a" to follow "t" -- "kato2" or "kata".
There are other P-J words beginning with "kat" that *do* have expected vowels afterward -- "katu" has the standard verb ending, meaning "to win". We can't infer if "t" was the true consonant in P-Y cuz all verbs end in "u" in Japonic, so this is not really an open dummy vowel that can reincarnate lost info about the coda consonant.
There's no "kato2", but there are two separate "kata" words -- an adjective meaning "hard, diffucult", and a prefix meaning "one side or half of a pair" (as in "katana" = "kata + na" = "one-side + edge / blade").
I'm more inclined to think those words have a "t" (or "d") in P-Y, since getting the expected vowel means it's ordinary, nothing special to note -- no lost info from the coda being reincarnated in the dummy vowel.
That doesn't mean the P-Y word is "kat" -- the vowel could be a bit different, and the onset could have altered / merged from the P-Y source. Just talking about the coda in P-Y.
Expected dummy vowel in Japonic = 2nd C is in the P-Y source.
Unusual dummy vowel in Japonic = 2nd C is not in the P-Y source, and the dummy vowel is giving a hint as to where to look for the P-Y source. E.g., unusual "i" = more toward the palatal place, unusual "u" or "o" = more toward the velar / uvular place.
That is, *if* the reincarnation mapping is phonetically motivated! It might not be. Just saying, if it is, it would be something like that, and that's presumably what they tried at the beginning. They would only turn to an arbitrary mapping if the motivated way didn't yield a clear 1-to-1 mapping.
Japonic words for "fire", "light", and "to shine, glitter" are all of Yeniseian / Na-Dene origin. The P-Y form is "beg" = "fire, light", although it's also reconstructed "boˀk" and "bowgʷ", and one of the related forms from Na-Dene is "ʔùg" (Tlingit). The other Na-Dene form, P-Athabaskan, has "e". So the vowel is uncertain -- probably high-front, but with shades of high-back.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Yeniseian/beg
Running "beg" through P-J phonology would devoice "b" to "p", and "g" to "k", and sticking a dummy vowel on the end, which should be "a" after "k" in OJ. That yields "peka", but P-J doesn't like "e", including after initial "p" (P-J words beginning with "pi" are far more common than "pe"). So it raises to "i", yielding "pika".
This provides the base for the total reduplication phrase "pika pika", meaning "shiny, glittery". That's an Early Modern phrase, and derives from the P-J verb "pikaru", whose ending "-ru" is the default verb ending, and so whose meaningful root is "pika". This verb means "to shine, glitter":
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/pikaru
But wait, there's more! The infinitive / nominal form of that verb is "pikari", which is a P-J noun meaning "light":
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/pikari
And finally, what about those high-ish back vowels? Well, we can't leave them out of this Trans-Pacific cook-out and laser-light show. There's the P-J word "poi" = "fire", whose realized vowels can be either "o" or "i" in Western OJ, but "u" in Eastern OJ.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/poi
This form has deleted the coda consonant from P-Y / P-ND, perhaps cuz that would entail a 3-mora word, "poiCV", against the preference for 2-moras only. The "pika" form kept the coda by keeping just 1 vowel before it, rather than trying to preserve 2 alternating vowels there as "poi" did.
Wiktionary speculates that the "pi" in "pika" may be cognate with "pi" = "sun, day, sun goddess", but in my view those are false cognates, since the word for sun derives from P-Y "xʷaj". But the "pi" in "pika" *is* cognate with another word, namely "poi" = "fire", all of which derive from P-Y "beg", and some older form still that is the bridge to the Na-Dene forms.
To clarify about the 2nd V slot in Japonic being a place for reincarnated info from the coda consonant in (Para-)Yeniseian -- I think this is mainly about the creation of the 2nd V slot in the Japonic word-shape paradigm, changing a typical CVC shape to a typical CVCV shape.
ReplyDeleteIt was about opening up new territory to be settled and cultivated -- to what extent, who knows? In what ways, who knows? It was a solution that came when the consonant inventory was being slashed, and they said:
"You know what? We really need some more space to re-settle the lost info from the 1st and 2nd consonants. We've already got the 1st vowel to accomodate the 1st C's info, but that means we really need a 2nd V to accomodate the 2nd C's info."
Merely opening up a new vowel slot doesn't mean it will be fully and efficiently settled by the lost info from the 2nd C. Some lost info might not make it. Some info that does make it, may not make the transition in the most sensorily efficient way.
And of course, new words (with no Yeniseian or other older lineage) will not show lost info in their 2nd V.
So, the transition will not look as neat and organized as the tonogenesis of Southeast Asian languages. It's more about the creation of the 2nd V slot itself, allowing the slashed consonant inventory to be more expressive by giving each C a vowel for modification.
And that's why Japonic phonology and orthography has always focused on moras, usually of the form CV (optionally just V), rather than separating C's from V's.
In the historical path that Japonic took, from Para-Yeniseian, linking C's and following V's made sense -- these evolved from earlier single consonants in Para-Yeniseian.
Just making it up for example, and only somewhat phonetically motivated. I don't actually believe this particular mapping, just to demonstrate the principle.
k -> ka
c -> ki
q -> ku
g -> ke
G -> ko
If there is *some kind* of mapping like this back through the history of Japonic, regardless of what that further-back source is (Yeniseian or otherwise), then of course it makes sense to focus on CV moras instead of separating C's from V's.
The CV pair preserves the 1-to-1 mapping to its earlier origin, while severing C's from V's and treating all instances of a given C as the same, and all instances of a given V as the same, totally obscures this historical mapping.
I trust the intuition of Japanese monks who created their orthography -- it wasn't by some autistic "intelligent design" universal Reddit dictator. It was based on the needs and patterns of the Japanese language, not some other language. There must have been a reason they focused on V and CV moras. I just gave one compelling reason.
Similar to the orthography for Saharo-Arabian languages, which tend not to write vowels in the same row as consonants, unless they're long vowels. If anything, they add the vowels in their own row(s) separate from the consonant row -- just like their morphology behaves, with the 2 or 3-consonant (or long vowel) root, zippering with a separate 2 or 3-vowel pattern. That was done for some compelling reason.
Here's a striking numerical similarity -- Japonic has a CV *mora* inventory of about 40 (a bit more in the past, when more "w" and "y" syllables existed). That is the size of a syllabary table, whether hiragana or katakana -- 9 consonant bases, each modified by 5 vowels (with some absences).
ReplyDeleteThe size of the Proto-Yeniseian *single* consonant inventory is 32 (could be a little more or less, depending on the reconstructor). That seemingly DWARFS the puny 9 consonant inventory of P-J -- talk about the consonant merger marathon! Talk about the homophone problem from hell!
However, if those 30-some consonants in P-Y are not mapping onto single consonants in P-J, but onto CV moras, then P-J can easily handle this mapping in a 1-to-1 way. No lost info, no homophone problem from hell. The mapping may not be the most phonetically straightforward -- but transparency and continuity is more important than the sensory motivation of the alterations.
Tellingly, the single vowel inventories for both proto-languages are the same size and same distribution in the vowel space -- 5 for P-Y ("a", "i", "u", "e", "o"), and 6 for P-J, the same 5 as in P-Y plus "o2". So that mapping can be handled 1-to-1 as well.
P-Y also has a variety of vowel + glide pairs, and that's the only tricky part for mapping onto P-J, where vowel sequences are not allowed, coda consonants are not allowed, and where I've made all that fuss out of the glide turning into its vocalic counterpart and replacing the preceding single vowel (with "a" being more resistant to that process, and so where the glide is simply deleted).
There was no massive reduction in the vowel inventory between P-Y and P-J, therefore no need to add extra slots to the word-shape paradigm to accomodate lost info from vowels. The size and membership of the vowel inventory stayed basically the same!
The massive reduction in the single consonant inventory was followed by the creation of the 2nd V slot, as well as the appearance of a 2-dimensional 9x5 CV mora table for their (consonant-initial) syllabary, rather than a 1-dimensional list of 9 consonants.
That really says that single C's from (Para-)Yeniseian became CV moras in Japonic.
Nobody has ever thought of this before, cuz they have no clue where Japonic comes from, so why would they ever suspect that the 45 CV moras of the Japonic syllabary came from an earlier single consonant inventory. Why, that would have to be one of those languages with a HUGE number of consonants! And "everybody knows" that Japonic has no earlier ancestors, it was just mysteriously dropped onto the Japanese islands in 300 BC by the Pacific Island Language Stork!
But the cliff-dwelling sage in the ruins of the blogosphere has uncovered the answer! ^_^
The mapping isn't totally 1-to-1, cuz some of the V's in Japonic reflect V's in Yeniseian, but some are dummy modifiers of the preceding C. And even the 1st V in Japonic is both trying to reflect the V from Yeniseian, but may also be colored by the 1st C from Yeniseian as well, as the consonant inventory is being slashed and its lost info wants to show up on the 1st V somehow.
ReplyDeleteThe second CV in a typical CVCV shape in Japonic, is likely to reflect a single coda consonant in Yeniseian.
Bu the first CV is reflecting both the single onset consonant in Yeniseian, as well as the single nuclear vowel -- and potentially colored / replaced by the optional coda glide -- from Yeniseian.
So in Japonic, single consonants do not map back onto Yeniseian. Single vowels don't either.
The 2nd CV mora is likely to map back onto Yeniseian, although the 1st CV mora is not part of a 1-to-1 mapping, since there's interference from the onset consonant and nuclear vowel of the P-Y source.
And yet, just cuz it's not a perfect 1-to-1 mapping in both directions, doesn't make it a bad, opaque, confusing mapping. They did the best they could, especially in the 2nd CV mora.
I also haven't looked into the distribution of P-Y consonants by position in the word, so this mapping might be even better, if not all 32 consonants commonly appeared in both onset and coda position. That's a later wrinkle to iron out.
The big picture is that they handled the reduction in consonants by mapping them to CV moras, and that mostly solved the problem of preserving the information from their source / ancestor.
What a happy ending to what seemed like a Biblical Flood story! All those exotic consonants from Yeniseian were not exactly lost to history -- they just evolved and adapted into CV moras when they washed up on the shores of their new Japanese utopian refuge.
Awwww... ^_^
Attila the Hun himself shows up in this Japonic etymology! More proof of Japanese origins in the Eastern Steppe.
ReplyDeleteP-Y "ajt" = "quick, swift" and "alive". The connection seems to be energetic -- allowing the body to be swift, and giving the body a sensation of liveliness.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Yeniseian/ajt
P-J "ati" (listed as "anti" at Wiktionary, though as usual, no evidence for the nasal, probably re-analyzed later as a compound, and rendaku applied to the "t", making it "d" and later "j").
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/anti
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%91%B3#Japanese
It means "flavor, taste", but later (or at the same time?) took on an adjective meaning "clever, smart, witty", along with "mysterious, strange". The noun extended from "flavor" to include "sensation", "experience", and "charm".
That sounds like the same 2-fold meaning having to do with "energetic" from Yeniseian. Clever, smart, and witty is about quick brain activity. And sensation, flavor, experience is like the "liveliness" meaning of the Yeniseian word -- full of sensory activity or energy.
Pretty good semantic match.
Phonetically, the P-Y "a" again resists being replaced by the vocalic counterpart of the glide, remaining "a". The "t" is no problem to carry over.
Its dummy vowel is not the default one, though not reflecting an unusual coda consonant in P-Y -- due to avoiding homophony in P-J. From most to least common, the "t" syllables in OJ are "to", "ta", "tu", "te", "ti". "Ato" is already taken by "footprint" ("ato") and "heel" ("anto"). "Ata" is the base of "ata ata" = "warm", and related "atu" is taken by "hot". "Ate" was not taken, but the "e" vowels resulted from earlier vowel sequences, both starting with "i", which would imply "ati(a,o2)" anyway at an earlier stage.
Now onto Attila. As cited in the Wiktionary entry for P-Y "ajt", his name is suspected to derive from P-Y "ajt + -ɬaw" = "swift + emphatic suffix" = "very swift".
ReplyDeleteWait a minute, we saw that suffix just a few days ago -- it's "sa", "so", etc., in Japonic, with the same meaning.
So the cognate name of Attila in Japonic would be "ati + sa". We'll look for that in a second. First, other names potentially deriving from P-J "ati", modern "aji".
Well, there's just plain ol' Aji.
Interestingly, there's Ajio, from earlier "ati + wo", meaning "quick-witted man". And unlike most names in Modern Japanese, whose kanji don't always relate to the original meaning but are more for phonetic value and new impressionistic meanings, Ajio does use the original kanji for P-J "ati" and "wo" -- 味夫.
Now, what about that "ati + sa" name? Pretty close, there's modern Ajisai, which is also the word for "hydrangea". Which came first, the personal name or the flower name? IDK, but this word is the cognate of Yeniseian Attila!
In OJ of the 8th C., it was "adisawi", and one theory of its origin points to the P-J "ati" = "flavor".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%B4%AB%E9%99%BD%E8%8A%B1#Japanese
The only question is where "sawi" comes from. If it's cognate with Yeniseian, "sa" is an emphatic particle / suffix -- in the case of a hydrangea, meaning "very stimulating" due to its vivid color, the way we'd describe a woman as "lively".
In the case of a man's name, it means "very quick-witted", "very charming", "very lively, full of vim and vigorous, etc."
As for the final "wi", I can only speculate that this is trying to preserve the coda glide from the Yeniseian form, with the dummy vowel "i" suggesting and adjective or a continuative / noun form of a verb, since it has both and adjective and noun meaning.
There's another Hunnic name with the same root, "Atakam", suspected to derive from "ajt + ɢejm" = "lively + woman". We just saw "ɢejm", too -- it's "imo" in P-J, and means "close female companion, sister".
ReplyDeleteSo the Japonic cognate name would be "ati + imo", with mostly the same meaning as the Hunnic name. Phonetically, the two "i" vowels would contract, and the modern reflex of P-Y "ti" in this word would be "ji", yielding Ajimo -- which is listed as a surname, but not a given name. Still there, though.
And it does indeed use the kanji for "flavor, quick-witted" to represent "aji", although for "mo" it uses the kanji for "cotton, wool" -- 味も.
But that's to be expected, since "imo" losing its 1st vowel during the contraction, would erase the awareness of the "mo" coming from "imo" = "woman, sister", so they just assumed "mo" was the original form and gave it the symbol for "cotton, wool".
But way back when, this name was cognate with the Yeniseian Hunnic name Atakam, and meant "quick-witted woman" or "lively woman" -- they were proud of their va-va-va-voom baddies in the Eastern Steppe!
Like I said, the Amazons were from the Eastern Steppe, and that heritage continues even through the contemporary culture of Glorious Nippon! ^_^