Sakoku : an investigation into phonological adaptations of Dutch loanwords in Japanese from 1639 to 1854

• Main Author: Chan, Louis Ace Chang Bok
• Other Authors: Perono Cacciafoco Francesco
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2021
• Subjects: Humanities::Linguistics
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/147385
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This research investigates how Dutch loanwords were phonologically adapted in Japanese during sakoku (1639-1854). The investigation is based on examining Dutch loanwords in Kaisei Zōho Bangosen, a compilation of Dutch-Japanese wordlists from 1847. While there were several past papers on Dutch-Japanese interactions during sakoku, these were scholarly interpretations that lacked linguistic analyses and evidences. Some of the interpretations were widely-held misconceptions in the field, such as the misunderstanding of the Japanese using katakana arbitrarily to represent Dutch words. The findings in this research disprove this misconception through linguistic evidences and formulate general phonological and orthographic principles that the Japanese adhered to. Apart from providing intellectual contributions to the literature on historical Dutch-Japanese interactions, this paper also evaluates theories on phonological adaptations based on the research findings. The research findings corroborate the Perceptual Theory by Peperkemp and Dupoux (2003), which is defined as the mapping of foreign sounds in loanwords to the most phonetically similar sounds in the borrowing language. On a final note, future studies can build on this paper to describe other linguistic phenomena in Dutch-Japanese interactions during sakoku.