Barry Caplan wrote: > To: Stefan Persson; [EMAIL PROTECTED] > At 10:08 PM 9/30/2002 +0200, you wrote: > >"Yen" is an ancient "on" pronunciation for U+5186; today it's > >pronounced "en."
> Really? I have no sources either way, but I always assumed > "yen" was a Western transliteration of "en", since there is > no "ye" entry in the kana table. Modern Japanese has 5 basic vowels, /a, i, u, e, o/. Old Japanese most likely had 8 vowels, /a, i1, i2, u, e1, e2, o1, o2/. These can further be traced to a proto-Japanese 4-vowel system /a, i, u, o/. In the y-line, there is currently /ya, yu, yo/. During the Nara period where the first extant literature appears, there is evidence that the man'yougana (precursor to modern kana; Chinese characters) regularly distinguished between two types of /e/ (called Kou/Otu or A/B sounds, among others). This is usually taken by most scholars as /e/ and /ye/. By the early Heian period, with the emergence of the kana syllabary, this Kou/Otu distinction vanished, specifically the /e/ and /ye/ distinction by around 938 AD. It is usually assumed that the /e/ and /ye/ (which is written with /e/) merged into [ye] (or [je], if you like). Notice that the Portuguese dictionary of 1603 spells this /e/ as "ye". Other documents indicate that this /e/ [ye] must have become [e] (as modern) by 1775 or earlier. Also note that some dialects in Kyushu still retain the [ye] pronunciation for /e/. I do not really have the time to go into more details right now. I hope this will suffice. Ben Monroe
