As most of you know, Japanese has an interesting (and for learners, possibly annoying) feature called Rendaku (連濁) where, an unvoiced consonant can become voiced if it occurs in the middle of a word. This evolved because certain phonemes are just easier to say as voiced consonants. But it’s often unpredictable, and just has to be memorized for the most part.
For example, in 人々(ひとびと), the second ひ becomes voiced and turns into び with dakuten.
In 作り話(つくりばなし), the は in はなし turns into ば for ばなし
I can think of at least one very similar example in Standard American English that came to me in the shower. “Ex” in English is usually pronounced “eks”, like in “excel”, “ex-girlfriend”, etc.
However, in certain words like “example”, the Ex becomes voiced and turns into “egzample”. “Exam” becomes “egzam”. Or the word “exist” in the title of my post, is pronounced “egzist”. At least in American English you would never say “ekssam” for exam. It just feels easier and natural to say it with voiced consonants.
I’m not a linguist or anything, I just thought this was interesting.
5 comments
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assimilation_(phonology)
This is what you’re thinking of, I believe.
>But it’s often unpredictable, and just has to be memorized for the most part. For example, in 人々(ひとびと), the second ひ becomes voiced and turns into び with dakuten. In 作り話(つくりばなし), the は in はなし turns into ば for ばなし
This isn’t a case of (phonological) assimilation though. This is intervocalic (between vowels) /p/ /b/, which used to exist historically, being preserved, while word initial /p/ evolved to /b/ and then /h/, iirc.
I think that somewhat depends on the region you learned english. Saying it to myself, exam, exist, and example are all “eks” for me.
>However, in certain words like “example”, the Ex becomes voiced and turns into “egzample”. “Exam” becomes “egzam”. Or the word “exist” in the title of my post, is pronounced “egzist”.
Uh, what?
That’s not the same thing at all.
Rendaku is a type of [sandhi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandhi). It only occurs at the boundary between two morphemes. For example, in hito-bito, you have the morpheme hito twice, and at the boundary between these two morphemes you have rendaku.
In ex-girlfriend, you have three morphemes: ex, girl, and friend. But for the rest it’s probably just words that happen to start with “ex,” and that “ex” doesn’t mean anything by itself. Like what does the ex in “example” mean? The ex in “excel”? In “exam”?
Most likely the reason these words are pronounced differently in English is that they originate in different languages (like some from french and others from german or something like that).
One thing that English does have that is a bit similar are words like “ping pong” and “tick tock,” which are said to feature ablaut reduplication. So just like hito-bito reduplicates the morpheme hito, ping pong reduplicates the morpheme ping.
I think in English it’s just the case of a letter having several sounds, that’s it.
Rendaku happens under specific conditions in specific circumstances (mostly), but X just has 2 pronunciations.
Another example is the leter g – the word garage isn’t a rendaku, nor is it similar to it, it’s just 2 different pronunciations of the same letter.