Rendaku

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

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

1 Properties Blocking Rendaku
2 Further Considerations
3 References
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Properties Blocking Rendaku

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

[edit] Lyman's Law

The most famous of the conditions affecting rendaku is known as Lyman's Law (although the phenomenon was originally discovered by Motoori Norinaga in the 18th century), which stated that rendaku does not occur if the second consonant of the second element is a voiced obstruent. This was later modified to state that rendaku does not occur when the second element of the compound contains a voiced obstruent in any position (see third example below). This is considered to be one of the most fundamental of the rules governing rendaku.

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

[edit] Lexical Properties

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

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

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

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

[edit] Semantics

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

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

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

[edit] Branching Constraint

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

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

[edit] Further Considerations

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