Talk:Rendaku

Kenzaburou

How about the name "Kenzaburou"? --User:Juuitchan, at 02:40, 7 July 2004

unpredictable

I'll change "Rendaku thus remains partially unpredictable, sometimes presenting a problem even to native speakers, particularly in Japanese names." to "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." -- unsigned by 172.132.87.40 at 15:01, 31 July 2004

Maybe this sentence is worth being split into two? Rs180216 (talk) 07:38, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

Group voice

"Group voice"!? More like "following-muddy", no? Jpatokal 02:10, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

蓮華

Hi,

Could you help me ? I just started learning a while ago and I have no idea why 蓮華 is not written れんけ but れんげ and found this article. Since there is no second consonant I was not sure if it is the same phanomenon or "げ" is just a rare reading.

I think it is a Rendaku case but wanted to ask :) Also I would like to know how one can handle "no second consonant" cases and if they will allways change.

If this is not the way to ask such a thing I hope you drop me a line how to do it better ;)

Thanks for reading and answering 79.192.225.72 (talk) 02:08, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

Sandhi

There's a link to [[Sandhi]] at the end of the article, but the word is not used in the text. Is rendaku just the Japanese word for sandhi, or is there some distinction?  Randall Bart   Talk  02:40, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Sandhi is a very general linguistic term for a group of similar processes found in many different languages (see the article for a better description). Rendaku is the name of the specific sandhi found in Japanese, but it would presumably not be the correct way to describe, e.g. Celtic mutations. Sort of as "textile fiber" includes wool, but not all textile fiber is wool. Except that's a bad example, because most people would know what a "textile fiber" is, so it is useful to include it in your description of wool. Few other than linguists/students of linguistics are going to know what sandhi means, so a simple description of the local (that is, the language's) process is better than calling it sandhi.

Not sure about lenition, which is a slightly more specific term than sandhi, and also a bit more widely used.--Wlerin (talk) 02:23, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

Kana

"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."

I don't think that is a good way to describe this phenomenon because it has nothing to do with the writing system. The change occurs in the speech of illiterates and children as well, and as far as we know it occurred before writing entered Japan. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.180.47.247 (talk) 21:26, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

I tried to remove this passage again but my edit was reverted -- I want to see some citation from an actual Japanese linguistics article or book that describes rendaku as a phenomenon of written symbols rather than of spoken sounds. Otherwise, I'm going to remove the sentence again. The current wording is misleading or nonsense: "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." That would mean that rendaku did not occur before the invention of kana and of dakuten. It may be easy for learning Japanese to use this idea, but for an article describing the linguistic phenomenon in an encyclopedia, it's not appropriate. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.181.77.26 (talk) 20:06, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

The current wording is more accurate than simple voicing, as h does not become b simply by activating your vocal cords. As there is no adequate phonological term to describe this series of changes, the name of its written symbol is more than adequate. Further, while the "ten" part of dakuten refers to a dot, or written symbol, the daku portion refers to the sound change it represents, and is also found in the name of the change (ren*daku*). Before I ramble on any further, your change should have been reverted, as it was just as misleading, if not more, than the text you replaced. There's also the whole no-original-research stipulation. If the sources describe it as the addition of a (han)dakuten, then that is what it is.--Wlerin (talk) 02:23, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

Brackets

Romanizations of Japanese should not be in square brackets. Else they look like IPA, and it gets confusing.--Solomonfromfinland (talk) 07:12, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

Hiragana

Unbelievably there was just a single kana with dakuten hidden somewhere in the depths of the article! I added the corresponding hiragana to the examples given. I believe this greatly helps understanding. Of course there might be arguments against it, like "those words are rarely written in hiragana" or "these details belong in the kana articles", but I would like to argue that in any case this is much better than just the plain roomaji. --BjKa (talk) 10:45, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

Lyamn's Law

The last example does not exemplify Lyman's Law in the way it was described in the artice, since the second consonant of the second part of suno + tokage is a "k" which is an "un"voiced obstruent. Changed the explanation of Lyman's law, and added a reference.Logologics (talk) 15:54, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

What makes it un voiced? Rs180216 (talk) 07:37, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

Please also add the 漢字 to the Examples

Please also add the 漢字 to the Examples. Jidanni (talk) 05:33, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

Consonants undergoing rendaku

on this page there is no mention of y changing, as only consonant changes are listed however there are exampüles where y becomes b, for example the word fubuki (blizzard) it consists of the stem for the verb blow "fu.ku" and snow "yuki" which becomes buki — Preceding unsigned comment added by 132.187.253.28 (talk) 09:41, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

吹雪 fubuki does not come from 吹く fuku + 雪 yuki. It comes from the verb fubuku,[1] which is probably a reduplication of 吹く fuku. The kanji 吹雪 are therefore ateji, or 熟字訓 to be more precise. So it involves [ɸ]—not [j]—becoming [b]. [j] is a palatal consonant and [b] is bilabial, while the very definition of rendaku is voicing of a homorganic consonant, so it would be quite a big leap if what you suggest was the case. Nardog (talk) 02:47, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

Hyphens, morpheme boundaries

There are hyphens in many of the examples, ostensibly showing morpheme boundaries, but currently they are inconsistent and some are inaccurate. For example, fu-ku should be fuk-u. Are they necessary? --Rdoegcd (talk) 22:08, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

I'm not sure exactly what hyphens in those words are supposed to mean, but they're always at syllable boundaries... AnonMoos (talk) 00:44, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

Lyman's law

It would be more useful if the examples also stated what is the voiced obstruent in the second element in each example. 89.139.191.144 (talk) 08:47, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

"Rendaku" in northern dialects?

@Porkey & Toothy: Forgive me if I'm wrong, but the content of this edit doesn't sound like rendaku. The only compound word listed in the examples is 魔女, and the form it takes in the unspecified northern dialects in question also doesn't sound like rendaku. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 11:19, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

Missing rendaku rule

I am not knowledgeable about rendaku so I went on this page to read about it. While it explains what it is, its origins, and gives some examples, there doesn't seem to be an explanation of the rule itself and how it's used?

I might be misunderstanding but while there are explanations of the exception to the rule, it's missing the definition of the rule itself. It's not something I can write myself so I am leaving this discussion post here to ask about it. CeaselessAlarmed (talk) 12:32, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

Do you mean a technical linguistics rule in phonological notation, or an explanation of when it applies? AnonMoos (talk) 21:18, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

Both I suppose. The page explains what it is and gives examples, but it doesn't explain "rendaku happens when X and is achieved by doing Y" in the general sense.

It does explain rules to its exceptions, but not to what it is.

Unless the reason is this:

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.

CeaselessAlarmed (talk) 16:00, 13 September 2023 (UTC)