Midaregami

Before I get into the textbook reading, I’m going to comment on the “We don’t say that” statement from a girl in class.

It was on Friday, Sep. 16, and we were discussion the phonological changes that occur in rapid or informal speech. You put forth the observation that mora from the ラ行 often change to the mora nasal in rapid speech, and the class was considering the applicability of this rule—was it a predictable phenomenon, or was it like “gonna” and “wanna” in that it was lexically-determined and unpredictable?

So, could someone shorten an informal これ、だれの？ to something like これ、だんの？ Our answer came quickly and authoritatively from that fount of linguistic illumination, the native speaker. “We don’t say that,” she said. End of story.

The temptation to become sarcastic here is nearly overwhelming, but I’ll resist. Suffice to say, when I am puzzling over a question of English usage put to me by a non-native speaker (as I often did while on the JET program) I tried to phrase my responses using things like “I think,” or “It’s probably,” knowing that I wasn’t necessarily speaking for all native speakers everywhere.

The “we don’t say that,” mentality just reeks of 我々日本人, and it kind of ticked me off.

Getting back to the specific example, I may not be a native speaker, but I can easily imagine a punk high school kid pointing to somebody’s cell phone on a crowded coffee shop table and asking, “これだんの？” I may be mistaken in my assessment, but I think it’s premature to state authoritatively that, no, none of the 120 million Japanese people would say this.

It felt good to get that off my chest. Moving on to more relevant things, reading the textbook treatment of infixing in Japanese and English, she says that Japanese has none, and like you, my immediate thought was, “what about the mora obstruent?” But maybe that’s debatable. The mora obstruent and the long vowels cited in class as possible examples of infixing don’t themselves generate a new sound—they affect timing and length only. It seems to me that words like すっごく aren’t products of infixing so much as they are a phonological expression of emphasis, much like palatalization of fricatives in memetics.

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