In some phonological theories, word-internal information as being visible in the post-lexical domain is not expected. This study takes up high vowel devoicing in Japanese, a post-lexical process, and investigates whether morphological structure may have an effect in its application. The results of a corpus study using the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese suggest that the word-internal boundary investigated herein has an effect on the devoicing likelihood but not in an across-the-board way and that phonological factors have an effect. It is proposed that what seems to be reference to morphology may in fact be analyzed as being phonological.

In this paper, I analyzed the pronunciation assignments submitted by Chinese learners of Japanese, and categorized the misuse patterns of palatalized mora into five categories. (1) Palatalization: pronouncing two separate morae as one palatalized mora. (2) Extension: extending short palatalized mora. (3) Shortening: pronouncing long palatalized mora without enough length. (4) Different vowel: confusing “yu” with “yo”. (5) Chinese vowel: substituting L1 Chinese vowel for Japanese “yu”. I also extracted learners’ introspection on palatalized mora from review sheets. Comparing it with misuse patterns, I discussed causes of misuse, sound environment effects, relationship between misuse and L1-dialect, and awareness of pronunciation.

It is well known that the labial p in Old Japanese was spirantized to ɸ and, in the initial position, finally changed to h sound about the 18th century. Firstly, we discuss the chronological order of the intervocalic lenition p > ɸ > w and the initial p > ɸ in terms of the naturalness of sound changes. Secondly, we argue that the initial p of the mimetic roots was as a rule spirantized, and most of the forms disappeared in the process of the change ɸ > h, as opposed to the bifurcation theory suggesting that the spirantization p > ɸ did not target the sound symbolic words. We conclude that the lenition p > ɸ occurred more regularly rather than considered in the literature. Other relevant historical issues are also reviewed and discussed.

Of the two Tocharian languages, i.e. Tocharian A and B, it is well known that the Proto-Tocharian cluster *-kS- is sometimes reflected as -pS- in Tocharian A whereas the same cluster is preserved as -kS- in Tocharian B. While there are a number of brief references to this phenomenon in the literature, no comprehensive investigation of the available data and nature of this change has been carried out. Here I collect all of the known examples and discuss the conditions under which this change may occur and the nature of the change from a crosslinguistic perspective. I argue that *-kS- >-pS- can be understood as an instance of change within the framework of Blevins’ (2004) ccc-model of sound change.

In some Sinitic varieties in Southern China, affricate onsets of Ancient Chinese, namely Zhuang-mu and Zhang-mu, are irregularly and sporadically realized as nasal. This paper discusses the causes and the mechanism behind this phenomenon diachronically and synchronically. It is highly probable that there existed unknown extinct Sinitic varieties which belong to a different lineage from extant major varieties (i.e., Yue and Guinan–Pinghua) in Southern China, in which Zhuang-mu and Zhang-mu are plosivised, implosivised, and finally nasalized, and that the nasalized morphemes observed in extant varieties are borrowed fragmentally from the extinct varieties.

This paper explores correspondences between Western Old Japanese (WOJ) non-front mid-vowels and modern Ryukyuan. Although Ryukyuan underwent an essentially unconditioned mid-vowel raising, and WOJ mid-vowels typically correspond to Ryukyuan close vowels, occasionally the WOJ “o”-vowels unexpectedly correspond to unraised Ryukyuan mid-vowels. Through an extensive lexicographic study of the relevant correspondences between WOJ, North and South Ryukyuan, I have looked for patterns in that apparent irregularity. The conclusion is that the modern Ryukyuan back mid-vowel indeed reflects Proto-Japonic *o and *ɘ, and the explanations of that retention are partially rooted in systemic sound changes and partially in intrinsic (“natural”) articulatory causes.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the exceptional words to the phenomenon of the word-initial syllable loss immediately before k’ (glottalized k) (i.e., CVk’V- > k’V-) in Yonaguni Ryukyuan to find out possible reasons why they did not undergo the change. The existence of those words has been pointed out, but no explanations have been given. This paper outlines the phenomenon and then gives its explanations why those exceptional words exist. The paper concludes that they are in general loanwords that came into the language after the occurrence of the change.

This study examines the regularity of sound changes in rGyalthangic, a Tibetic dialectal group spoken in Yunnan, China, and discusses how to characterise processes of fricativisation of dorsal (i.e., prepalatal, palatal, and velar) obstruents based on current dialectal data collected with geolinguistic methodology. The article focuses first on how retention and merger occurred in the sounds derived from a set of four series in Literary Tibetan, Ky, Kr, Pr and Py, within Khams Tibetan and the target languages. Second, it describes detailed processes of sound change in the Pr and Py series in relation to dorsal initials, and discusses how fricativisation developed.