2025 Volume 21 Issue 1 Pages 18-34
The aim of this work was to ascertain the factors that led to the appearance of the spelling tt in the Barreto Manuscript, a Christian manuscript.
The Barreto Manuscript (Barreto Shahon, Reg.Lat.459) was written in Romanized Japanese by the Portuguese missionary Manoel Barreto in 1591. In the manuscript, the consonant /t/ in the phonemes /ta/, /te/, and /to/ is sometimes written with the double consonant letters tt (e.g. vomotte [面], atto [後]). Previous studies considered these letters to represent certain phonetic features, such as accentuation or consonant gemination. In contrast, the current work argues that tt was the result of the influence of Latin and Portuguese spellings at that time. In the manuscript, this spelling tt tends to appear in the word-initial att- sequence or just before the word-final vowel. This tendency is consistent with the position of the spelling tt in lexical items in Latin and Portuguese dictionaries from the same period as well as with criptions in 17th- and 18th-century Portuguese orthographic dictionaries. In addition, based on the distribution of tt in the Barreto Manuscript, the spelling tt reflects the Portuguese spelling system of the time, which was influenced by the Latin spelling system.
