こ、こう、っこ origin story

After starting over, I’m almost back to Level 10, the place where I start to wonder if 1000 years ago, there was a committee deciding the Japanese language, and the older guy, who was the boss of the committee just because he’d been there the longest, said “I’m going to have half the words include こ、こう or っこ at random”… and then a younger guy on the committee spoke up and said “that’s insane, why would you do that”, and then the boss got angry and said high-pitched guttural angry things, and everyone on the committee just followed the boss, because, you know… that’s… what you do.

Yes, that exactly what happened, except that they were deciding the Chinese language, not Japanese. Japanese just had the misfortune of inheriting the readings.

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And the readings sounded different in Chinese (i.e. not all things that became こう are the same because of tones) but the Japanese just squished them into their pronunciation scheme anyway.

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