[This is a guest post by Lukhnos Liu]<\/p>\n
Oden<\/a> (\u304a\u3067\u3093) is a popular Japanese dish. Common ingredients include fishcakes, konjac cakes (or konjac noodles), daikon, and boiled eggs, all stewed in a lightly soy- or mirin-flavored dashi broth. It is also popular in Taiwan, usually called o-li\u00e1n and written as \u9ed1\u8f2a (\"black wheel\"), but I don't think I've heard anyone say the word in Mandarin (hei-l\u00fan). It is an example of how Taiwanese words are often written: the \u9ed1 in \u9ed1\u8f2a does not represent the sound o\u0358 \u2013 the character \u70cf (black, dark) does, and the character \u9ed1 (black) is pronounced hek<\/i>. Of course, later I learned that it's a Japanese loanword. The excuse I had for never making the connection between oden and o-li\u00e1n was they sound different, unlike, say, \u30e9\u30a4\u30bf\u30fc (raid\u0101, \"lighter\") and l\u00e0i-tah \u2013 and perhaps the characters \u9ed1\u8f2a also put me off the scent.<\/p>\n How did oden in Japanese become o\u0358-li\u00e1n in Taiwanese? In fact, o\u0358-li\u00e1n is not the only word that has such change in sound. Here are two more examples:<\/p>\n So there seems to be a \/d\/ to \/l\/ shift from Japanese to Taiwanese. I asked Professor Mair whether there is indeed such a shift, and if there is, whether it is a Taiwanese phenomenon, or whether those words got the sound through the Ky\u016bsh\u016b accent. A reviewer of an earlier draft of this post (who also provided two other examples above) responded:<\/p>\n My layman's feeling about the Taiwanese \/l\/ is that it is almost a plosive (i.e. the obstruction of airflow is greater than the approximant \/l\/ in English). Combined with the initial tongue position being quite far back (alveolar at least) it really sounds quite close to a Japanese \/d\/. So I don't believe it's as big a phonetic leap as it might first appear.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It is less clear whether there was any influence from the Ky\u016bsh\u016b accent. The reviewer suggested that the relationship between \/d\/ and \/r\/ might exist, citing Yeounsuk Lee's The Ideology of Kokugo: Nationalizing Language in Modern Japan<\/i> (1996, English translation 2010), in which Lee discussed how the Japanese language (nihongo), through education ordinances and textbook censorships, became the national language (kokugo) taught in schools:<\/p>\n The textbook placed exceedingly explicit emphasis on \"correct\" pronunciation. The sound and vocabulary in the first volume [of the normal elementary school reader] were \"carefully introduced in order to make correct\" distinctions between certain sounds that were confused in particular dialects, such as [\u2026] \/d\/ and \/r\/ in Kyushu dialect [\u2026] \u2013 an indication of a thorough and rigorous intention to standardize and unify pronunciation [\u2026] (p. 107)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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\nWhen I was younger, I thought it was called \"black wheel\" because one common ingredient used in Taiwan is pig's blood cake<\/a>, or \u8c6c\u8840\u7cd5 (ti-hoeh-ko\u00e9 \u00a0in Taiwanese; \u00a0zh\u016b xi\u011b g\u0101o in Mandarin), even though it's not sold in any cylindrical forms. You will not find that in Japan.<\/p>\n\n