Mark Irwin

Loanwords in Japanese

Loanwords in Japanese is the first monograph in a Western language to offer a systematic and coherent overview of the vast number of words borrowed into Japanese since the mid-16th century. Its publication is timely given the fact that the loanword stratum’s recent exponential growth has given rise to recent Japanese government publications seeking to outlaw foreign vocabulary or, at the very least, offer native translations. Beginning with a history of loanwords, chapters cover loanword phonology, loanword morphology, loanword orthography and official and public attitudes to Japanese loanwords. The volume will be of interest to a wide range of researchers, scholars and students of the Japanese language.

Sequential Voicing in Japanese: Papers from the NINJAL Rendaku Project

1. List of contributors 2. Introduction (by Vance, Timothy J.) 3. Generative treatments of rendaku and related issues (by Kawahara, Shigeto) 4. Psycholinguistic studies of rendaku (by Kawahara, Shigeto) 5. Rendaku and Identity Avoidance: Consonantal Identity and moraic Identity (by Kawahara, Shigeto) 6. Rendaku awareness of Japanese learners in Taiwan: Students at Ming Chuan University (by Nakazawa, Nobuyuki) 7. The Rendaku Database (by Irwin, Mark) 8. Rosens Rule (by Irwin, Mark) 9. Rendaku and individual segments (by Vance, Timothy J.) 10. Rendaku in Okinawan (by Serafim, Leon A.) 11. Rendaku in Tohoku Japanese: The Kahoku-cho Survey (by Miyashita, Mizuki) 12. Rendaku in cross-linguistic perspective (by Labrune, Laurence) 13. A rendaku bibliography (by Irwin, Mark) 14. References 15. Index

Mora clipping of loanwords in Japanese

Abstract Loanwords in Japanese undergo a variety of truncation processes, including mora-clipping. Mora-clipping can itself be subdivided into back- (e.g. čokoreeto > čoko ‘chocolate’), fore- (wanisu > nisu ‘varnish’) and mid-clipping (moruhine > mohi ‘morphine’). Although back-clipping is the unmarked process, this paper seeks to answer a major issue as yet unresolved in the literature: at which mora are back-, fore- and mid-clippings typically clipped, and why? Although previous studies have claimed that syllable structure plays a major role, many exceptions remain unexplained.