Hello,
I was reading the Tofugu article on Rendaku, and came across something interesting.
In this link, a list of prefixes and suffixes are given that never cause rendaku to happen. One of the rendaku-less suffixes is blood
However, in the same article, the word for nosebleed is presented with rendaku.
What exception am I not seeing here? I thought the prefixes and suffixes were absolute rendaku destroyers?
It says this
Now let’s look at resistant suffixes. By “resistant,” we mean they don’t like to rendaku, even if the words before them would normally cause it. These suffixes are like oil to rendaku’s water!
Also, after 鼻血, there’s only one other word that has a rendaku’d 血
黄血 (brandling, when used as fishing bait) and I have no idea what that even means in English.
To me that still says that they are absolutely refusing to mix with rendaku, so no rendaku. How do you interpret that?
Also, at the top of the page it says this:
Some prefixes block rendaku from occurring and some suffixes resist rendaku themselves.
To me, resistance means what they say. It “doesn’t like” to rendaku. Even something that is “fire-resistant” will burn at a high enough temperature, it’s just rated to resist flammability up to a certain temperature or for a certain amount of time. If we want to dive deeper into the semantics of it.
“Block” (for prefixes) sounds a lot more absolute than “resist” in their explanation.
But as I said, there are only two words with rendaku’d 血.
There’s basically no rule that can’t be broken somewhere.