Comparative Siouan Grammar workshop

[Rory M Larson]

Bryan wrote:
> Let's not forget that /w/ in both Japanese and O'odham surfaces as a 
bilabial fricative in certain contexts [ɸ]. I believe that in both 
languages the /w/ is produced with tensed rather than rounded lips, and 
has a much lesser velar component than in English.

I can partially vouch for that in Japanese.  I noticed the tense rather 
than rounded quality of /w/ in the first semester from the teacher's 
pronunciation, as well as the lack of a real [u] sound; the Japanese /u/ 
comes out more like the sound in "book" than in "boot".  Except for /o/, 
they don't seem to round their lips.  On the other hand, I have also read 
somewhere that this is characteristic of the Tokyo dialect, so it might 
not apply to Japanese or Japonic in general.

The Japanese syllabaries are defective in the /w-/ set, having only /wa/ 
and sometimes /wo/, which latter seems to exist only as the object marker 
and is usually pronounced as a strong o.  The bilabial fricative is 
perhaps the ancestor of the /h-/ series, which surfaces as /b-/ and /p-/, 
as well as /h-/ for /ha/, /he/ and /ho/, a voiceless velar fricative for 
/hi/, a voiceless bilabial fricative for /hu/, and an alternate wa for 
/ha/ when used as the topic marker.  It looks like lips and velum may both 
have been used for this originally.

Rory

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