3 ms·
> I think it's safe to assume that the Portuguese "pão" (bread) was pronounced much closer to "pan" around the time they made contact with Japan The evolution
by OfSanguineFire 3y ago
> I think it's safe to assume that the Portuguese "pão" (bread) was pronounced much closer to "pan" around the time they made contact with Japan
The evolution of nasal vowels in Portuguese out of Latin *n predates contact with Japan by centuries (see Nasal Vowel Evolution in Romance by Rodney Sampson, Oxford University Press, 1999).
It’s not unusual at all that Japanese, a language without nasal vowels, would then replace the Portuguese nasal vowel with the closest equivalent it had.
- yorwba 3y agoJapanese has nasal vowels and indeed the "a" in Japanese "pan" is nasalized.
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoI obviously meant phonemic nasal vowels. In Japanese, nasality of vowels appears in the context of a nasal consonant, so when borrowing the Portuguese word, Japanese had to supply the final consonant.