"Benjamin Smith Lyman and Rendaku," Timothy Vance - CJS Noon Lecture

November 05, 2009
12:00PM - 01:00PM, Room 1636, School of Social Work Building, 1080 S. University, Ann Arbor

Host Department: Center for Japanese Studies (CJS)

Free and Open to the Public.

Further Information

Benjamin Smith Lyman (1835–1920), an American geologist and mining engineer, worked in Meiji-era Japan as a foreign technical expert. He is famous among linguists because of an 1894 pamphlet in which he stated a generalization now known as Lyman’s Law. Lyman’s Law pertains to a familiar phenomenon referred to in Japanese linguistics by the technical term rendaku. A typical example of rendaku appears in the word nihon-zaru 'Japanese macaque': the consonant z appears in this word, although the word for monkey is saru, with the initial consonant s. Lyman’s Law is a putative constraint on rendaku that prohibits it from affecting elements that already contain a voiced obstruent (i.e., a consonant that in kana spelling would require a letter accompanied by the dakuten diacritic). For example, rendaku applies in ao-zame ‘blue shark’ (cf. same ‘shark’) but not inao-sagi ‘blue heron’ (cf. sagi ‘heron’, which contains the voiced obstruent romanized as g). There has been an understandable suspicion that Lyman did not actually discover the law that bears his name, and Miyake Takero pointed out in 1932 that Motoori Norinagastated something close to Lyman’s Law in his commentary on the Kojiki, the Kojiki-den (published 1822). Nonetheless, the speaker will argue that Lyman really did discover Lyman’s Law.

Timothy J. Vance is a professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona. He is the author of The Sounds of Japanese (Cambridge, 2009) and has been coordinating editor of Japanese Language and Literature since 2000.

 

Contact Information: 734.764.6307 or umcjs@umich.edu