Talk:ぴかぴか

Why the fortition?

@Mellohi! Do you have any idea, or maybe even a source of some kind, how this term went from /fikafika/ back to /pikapika/? I just think it's very strange that it disobeys the normal direction of /p/ -> /f/ (-> h, w) and apparently went all the way back to its roots. I added an expansion to the Etymology to this effect, please see if you like it and whether it's relevant or not. Kiril kovachev (talk・contribs) 19:29, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

(chiming in...)

I recall reading somewhere that the /p/ phoneme had pretty much vanished from Japanese by the Heian period, leniting to /f/ and likely realized more specifically as [ɸ], but then resurfaced during the Kamakura or Muromachi periods, perhaps initially in loanwords but also appearing for native yamato kotoba as well, primarily for mimetic words like pikapika, pittari, yappari, etc. Indeed, やっぱり (yappari) appears from 1477 according to the NKD entry (here at Kotobank) as a development of yafari, itself first attested in 1462 as an outgrowth of yafara (see same link). As a standalone, I'm finding yafara from 1275, but as the stem of yafaraka / presumably even older yaparaka, from 883.

There's a bit more detail on the JA WP at w:ja:は行#音韻史, but they don't mention any dates or periods for the re-emergence of the /p/ phoneme. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 21:15, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

I see, thanks for this update, this is great to know. I don't know whether to synthesise what you just said onto the etymology section or not in some capacity, do you think it's worth displaying? Kiril kovachev (talk・contribs) 13:47, 3 August 2023 (UTC)

It's probably worth displaying -- sounds like you find some value in it, for one. 😄 As time allows, I may see if I can find any specific sources for this too. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 23:32, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

@Eirikr: thanks, I now went and added a paragraph on that, replacing my speculation from before with this more concrete information. The Wikipedia page for Late Middle Japanese doesn't unfortunately go into any more detail than you did here, so this was all I could manage. Let me know if that looks good, and thanks for this help, Kiril kovachev (talk・contribs) 16:30, 8 August 2023 (UTC)