Talk:シャボン

Etymology

The etymology is not unknown -- Japanese sources are clear that this is from either Portuguese or Spanish.

The historical record seems to support a Spanish origin over Portuguese. As best I've been able to discern, modern Portuguese sabão has no predecessor form that was pronounced with an initial /ʃ/. The text at w:History_of_Portuguese#Medieval_sound_changes describes that initial ⟨sa⟩ has been consistently pronounced as /sa/.

By contrast, as described some here on Wikipedia, and as also demonstrated in English sherry borrowed with the initial /ʃ/ sound from the ⟨x⟩ spelling in older Spanish Xerez, modern Jerez, modern Spanish jabón has /x/ where Old Spanish xabon had /ʃ/. The article at w:Early Modern Spanish describes the state of the language during the most extensive contact with Japan, and the consonant inventory had not yet developed the voiceless velar fricative /x/. Page 217 of Orthographia Española, published 1741 (more details in Spanish here), shows the xabon spelling, and describes the pronunciation of the letter ⟨x⟩ as realized in the mid-18th century as “la pronunciacion gutural”, suggesting that Spanish phonetics had by this point shifted to use the voiceless velar fricative /x/. However, this is after the period of most extensive contact with Japan, and indeed almost all Spanish and Portuguese people were forcibly removed from Japan at the start of the Sakoku or “closed country” period in the early half of the 1600s, when the ⟨x⟩ spelling was still pronounced as /ʃ/.

‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 21:19, 11 January 2017 (UTC)