Rendaku (連濁, Japanese pronunciation:[ɾendakɯᵝ], lit.'sequential voicing') is a phenomenon in Japanesemorphophonology that governs the voicing of the initial consonant of a non-initial portion of a compound or prefixed word. In modern Japanese, rendaku is common but at times unpredictable, with certain words unaffected by it.
While kanji do not indicate rendaku, it is marked in kana with dakuten (voicing mark).
The voiced obstruent consonants of modern Japanese go back to prenasalized voiced obstruents of Old Japanese.[1] It has been hypothesized that rendaku historically originates from fusion of a nasal derived from the genitive postposition no (の) with a following consonant.[2]
One theory states that rendaku was originally a way to distinguish compound words from saying a word twice when comparing two words or listing things (compare ひとびと hitobito "people" – with rendaku – versus ひと、ひと hito hito "one person, another person" – without rendaku). Native Japanese words never begin with a voiced obstruentorsibilant (b, d, g, z, etc.) and so rendaku was merely an allophonic detail that did not create ambiguity.
However, after the 4th century, Japan started borrowing words and characters from Chinese, which caused the once regular process of rendaku to become less predictable. Since many Chinese words begin with voiced consonants, applying rendaku to those words would cause ambiguity (compare 試験 shiken "examination" with 事件 jiken "incident"). Therefore, compound words consisting of purely Chinese words tend not to exhibit rendaku, unlike compounds consisting of native Japanese words, but there are many exceptions.[3]
In some cases, rendaku varies depending on syntax. For instance, the suffix tōri (〜通り, "road, following"), from tōru (通る, "to go, to follow"), is pronounced as -tōri (〜とおり) following the perfective verb, as in omotta-tōri (思った通り, "as I thought"), but is pronounced as -dōri (〜どおり, with rendaku) when following a noun, as in yotei-dōri (予定通り, "as planned, according to schedule") or, semantically differently – more concretely – Muromachi-dōri (室町通, "Muromachi Street").
Rendaku occurs not only on single-root elements, but also "multi-root" elements, those that are themselves composed of smaller elements. These morphemes may be of Chinese origin (see kango) or more recent loanwords (see gairaigo) rather than strictly native.
ひら + か-な → ひら-が-な
hira + kana → hiragana ("plain" + "character", compare かた-か-なkatakana, which does not undergo rendaku)
Here, kiseru is a gairaigo, from the Khmer word khsiə ("pipe")
For certain morphemes that begin with the morae chi (ち) and tsu (つ), their rendaku forms begin with the morae ji and zu, spelled in hiragana as ぢ and づ, which explains the use of these kana in contrast to the identically pronounced じ and ず (see yotsugana). This is not a strict rule, however, and is relaxed in certain older compounds or names, especially those that are not easily recognized as compounds.
Rendaku occurs not only in compound nouns, but also in compounds with adjectives, verbs or continuative/nominal forms of verbs.
In many Tohoku dialects, rendaku can be expressed in the form of prenasalized voicing.[5] This prenasalized sound production was not uniform at all, and depending on the speakers and the words pronounced, significant variations were observed.[5]
There was a relationship between the rate of prenasalized voicing and the speakers’ age: older individuals display it at a higher rate than younger individuals.[5] On the other hand, differences in the speakers’ gender and socioeconomic status did not affect the rate of prenasalized voicing.[5]
Research into defining the range of situations affected by rendaku has largely been limited to finding circumstances (outlined below) which cause the phenomenon not to manifest.
Lyman's Law states that there can be no more than one voiced obstruent (a consonant sound formed by obstructing airflow) within a morpheme.[6] Therefore, no rendaku can occur if the second element contains a voiced obstruent. This is considered to be one of the most fundamental of the rules governing rendaku.
yama + kado → Yamakado (surname) 山門, not *Yamagado やまがど ("mountain" + "gate" → place name) (* indicates a non-existent form)
hitori + tabi → hitoritabi, not *hitoridabi ("one person" + "travel" → "traveling alone")
There are, however, exceptions to Lyman's Law. For example, nawa + hashigo is nawabashigo, not nawahashigo. Although this law is named after Benjamin Smith Lyman, who independently propounded it in 1894, it is really a re-discovery. The Edo period linguists Kamo no Mabuchi[7][8] (1765) and Motoori Norinaga[9][10] (1767–1798) separately and independently identified the law during the 18th century.
Similar to Lyman's Law, it has been found that for some lexical items, rendaku does not manifest if there is a voiced obstruent near the morphemic boundary, including preceding the boundary. [citation needed]
Rendaku is also blocked by what is called a "branching constraint".[11] In a right-branching compound, the process is blocked in the left-branching elements:
The branching constraint analysis could be considered a violation of the Atom Condition, which states that "in lexical derivations from X, only features realized on X are accessible." An alternative view proposes that the process applies cyclically.
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,[citation needed] 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. For example, 中田 may be read in a number of ways, including both Nakata and Nakada.
In some cases, voicing of preceding consonants also occurs, as in sazanami (細波, ripple), which was formerly sasa-nami. This is rare and irregular, however.
Native speakers usually (1.3% compared to 10% of all Sino-Japanese words) do not apply rendaku to compounds with clusters of voiced nasals and unvoiced obstruents.[13]
^Low, James, 2009, Issues in RendakuArchived 2016-03-03 at the Wayback Machine: Solving the Nasal Paradox and Reevaluating Current Theories of Sequential Voicing in Japanese. (Senior thesis in linguistics) Pomona College.
^Otsu, Yukio (1980). "Some aspects of rendaku in Japanese and related problems". MIT Working Papers in Linguistics: Theoretical Issues in Japanese Linguistics 2: 207–227.
Endō, Kunimoto (1981). "Hirendaku no Hōzoku no Shōchō to Sono Imi: Dakushion to Bion to no Kankei kara". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help) (Japanese citation: 遠藤邦基(1981)「非連濁の法則の消長とその意味―濁子音と鼻音との関係から―」(『国語国文』50-3))
Irwin, Mark (April 2005). "Rendaku-based Lexical Hierarchies in Japanese: The Behaviour of Sino-Japanese Mononoms in Hybrid Noun Compounds". Journal of East Asian Linguistics. 14 (2): 121–153. doi:10.1007/s10831-004-6306-9. ISSN0925-8558. S2CID55842710.
Vance, Timothy J.; Irwin, Mark, eds. (2016). Sequential Voicing in Japanese: Papers from the NINJAL Rendaku Project. Studies in Language Companion Series. Vol. 176. John Benjamins. doi:10.1075/slcs.176. ISBN978-90-272-5941-7. S2CID64058981.
