Pattern to H-mutation (into P or B)?

[Carvs]

@jneapan

Unfortunately I don’t remember where I read this, but maybe someone more linguistics-minded like @Carvs has more information.

I have been summoned, and I bring some information… I hope!

@quollism

Edit: Wikipedia says by Late Middle Japanese, the original /p/ had been changed into /h/ but they started using the /p/ sound again for a separate phoneme. Huh. No wonder this is so confusing…

That’s disputed. Basically, it’s hard to date the change so people have different opinions. From what I’ve seen, I’m partial to Frellesvig’s account, which I talked a bit about in the other post. But basically, in A History of the Japanese Language, he argues in favour /p/ being retained in Old and Early Middle Japanese, with a first change to /w/ in intervocalic position, and then from /p/ to /f/ (more or less) for the remaining /p/ in Late Middle Japanese only. In that version, /p/ didn’t get reintroduced in LMJ but rather it stayed as an available sound and new uses were coined then. The view exposed on Wikipedia is, I believe, the traditional one, more or less, that /p/ had already become /f/ by the classical period and either then or later became /w/ in medial positions; that’s the stance of, say, Vovin, in A Reference Grammar of Classical Japanese Prose, if I remember/understood correctly. Can’t say I’m deeply invested in the topic, though, so that’s about as much as I know.

@quollism

People generally don’t know the history of their own language though, so it could be that nowadays there’s an underlying sense of a phonetic rule which takes a modern /h/ and turns it into something else under certain conditions - it reconstructs the effect but from the opposite direction.

Well, that much is certainly true… in fact, I know more about the history of the Japanese language than the history of French (though I probably know more about the history of French than the average French person)… doesn’t help that my Latin is shamefully almost nonexistent. But they didn’t have anime in Latin… /o\

Anyway, there are no hard rules AFAIK, but I can comment on a couple of things you mentioned, if you want… no guarantees, though, my phonology knowledge is fairly limited. As they say: “provided as is”.

@quollism

In jukugo or kun’yomi compounds, (っ)ぱ could very well have started life as a は which got geminated/doubled (き/ち/つ+は geminates to っぱ across morpheme boundaries, though く+は doesn’t seem to trigger gemination except in counter words… ?)

This would be related to the no-singleton-P constraint: you can’t have a /p/ unless after /Q/ (geminated) or /N/ (post-nasal). This would seem to hold for “non-foreign” words only, though, since in Western borrowings, there are plenty of examples.

@quollism

Aside from gemination, ぱ in a kun’yomi compound is not mutated from は because non-geminating sound changes in kun’yomi compounding are all about the rendaku (so ば and not ぱ)

Well, that’s kind of (mostly?) true, but due to two factors:

• As mentioned above, both the native Japanese (“kunyomi”) and Sino-Japanese lexica respect the no-singleton-P constraint, so that leaves you with only /Qp/ and /Np/.
• Now, there is another constraint that converts /Np/ to /Nb/; Frellesvig says this used to be universal in EMJ, but was lost in LMJ, but even then it mostly only resulted in Sino-Japanese formations containing /Np/ and I can’t find any surviving examples of native words that contain /Np/. I have seen it listed as a rule elsewhere that /Np/ does not occur in synchronically (modern) native vocabulary at all.

So all that remains for native vocabulary (with possibly very rare exceptions), hence kunyomi, is /Qp/.

@quollism

• In a jukugo word, a reading beginning with B (e.g. ぶん) in a jukugo (e.g. 新聞・しんぶん) is almost never mutated from an H ふん with the major exception again being counter words, e.g. 三分・さんぶん
• In a jukugo word, a P-initial reading after ん (e.g. ~んぷん) comes from an H/F-initial reading (e.g. ふん)… with two exceptions: the country kanji for Portugal and Poland

This I am (even) less sure, but I would guess this is because Middle Chinese had no /h/ so everything was imported as /p/ or /b/, and it only became /h/ through the overall process that mutated /p/ to /f/ to /h/… but only in certain kanji, assuming the words existed when the change took place and participated in it (weren’t analysed as transparent compounds), and had been assimilated as full words by the time the normative go-on/kan-on readings were established. That’s a lot of ifs…

Overall, if you asked a native in modern times how they would pronounce imaginary compounds, I think the result would depend largely on how they felt about the words.

If you tell them they are loanwords from English, they’ll surely try to keep the pronunciation as close to the original as possible; say you tell them ほい is from English “hoy” (with whatever credible meaning you can invent), I believe they’d produce さんほい.

If on the contrary, you tell them it’s a long lost old Japanese counter from the Nara period, even though it may be all lies, if they believe you, they will probably apply all the good old rules and give you さんぼい.