Voicing of Obstruents in Old Japanese: Evidence from the Sound-Symbolic Stratum.

It is standard view in Japanese historical linguistics that voicing of obstruents in Old through Early Middle Japanese (c. 700–1200) was contrastive although largely limited to intervocalic position. However, Wenck (1959), Hayata (1977), and Takayama (1993) question this view by raising the possibility that early Japanese had only non- contrastive voicing of intervocalic obstruents. On this account, "voiced" and "voiceless" obstruents in intervocalic position were distinguished purely on the basis of prenasalization rather than voicing in early Japanese; the well-known weakening process of intervocalic /p/, which is commonly summarized as *p > *Φ > w, is recast as *p > *b > *β > w. This dissenting view is in fact more consistent with various sound change phenomena from Middle to Modern Japanese. This paper presents a novel piece of evidence from the sound-symbolic stratum which supports the view of Wenck, Hayata, and Takayama. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]