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As I read 「ノルウェイの森」 by 村上春樹, I noticed some words that are probably mistyped.

しかしそのおかけでクラスの中で僕の立場はもっと孤立したものになった。

Shouldn't it be そのおかげで?

A few more examples:

「...」と彼は黒いボストン・バックに衣類やノートを詰めこみながら言った。

バッグ => バック (no dakuten)

そしてそんなことを考えれば考えるほど僕の体は余計に飢え、そしで乾いた。

そして => そしで (extra dakuten)

彼にとつてはそれはただのゲームにすぎないのだ。

とって => とつて (っ grows up to つ, this is another kind of transformation, but I'm not sure if I should create a separate question for it)

Are these words just misprinted or they are used correctly?

nikkou
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    Which edition/page numbers did you find these? Perhaps someone else has the book (I don't) and could check. – nkjt Sep 20 '13 at 17:33
  • Page numbers are 21, 27, 28, 30 in my case. Unfortunately, it's only an electronic document and there's no edition specified. – nikkou Sep 21 '13 at 09:12
  • あの… I didn't think there was an e-book on sale for ノルウェイの森. (At least, not the Japanese version). – nkjt Sep 21 '13 at 10:05

1 Answers1

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I think おかけで, かつと, and そしで are most plausibly explained as misprints. They don't generally occur, and this novel is too recent (written in 1987) to make comparisons to historical kana orthography.

Although it's possible that バック too is a misprint, another explanation seems plausible to me in this case. In Japanese, a phenomenon called rendaku or sequential voicing occurs primarily in compounds such as ひとびと, in which ひと is joined with another ひと, but the second /h/ is voiced to /b/. This is limited (but not predicted) by Lyman's Law, a set of rules that explain when sequential voicing should not happen.

Although バッグ is not an example of sequential voicing, as it consists of a single morpheme loaned from English, if you apply a similar set of rules to loanwords in Japanese, you discover something interesting. If we applied Lyman's law, we'd find that the /k/ in ばっく could not voice to /g/ because of the voiced obstruent /b/ in the beginning of the word. And when Lyman's law would prevent voicing in native compounding, it manifests as optional devoicing in loanwords. That is, the /g/ in バッグ optionally devoices to /k/, giving us バック. Other examples include:

ビッグ　→　ビック
ベッド　→　ベット

This is a native Japanese phonetic rule appearing as a tendency in contexts where it should not strictly apply. This was first pointed out by Kohei Nishimura's thesis, Lyman's Law in Loanwords (2003) and has been the subject of some recent research. In particular, Shigeto Kawahara illustrates in Aspects of Japanese loanword devoicing (2011) that this devoicing is more likely to happen in words that are used more frequently.

(Of course, I think in published material it would still be considered an error, but I think there's at least a possibility that it's a more interesting kind of error than a simple misprint.)

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    Interesting about optional devoicing - I remember a while back reading an online novel by a native speaker who consistently used ベット for ベッド, which at the time I assumed was just an error by the author. – nkjt Sep 20 '13 at 19:48
  • The theory that the previous voicing has anything to do with it is interesting. I personally saw it as a symptom of voiced gemination not really existing in Japanese phonology (at least not originally). Except maybe in very clearly articulated speech バッグ and バック sound the same to me. Kinda like ヴ which might supposedly be labiodental, but not really in practice. – dainichi Sep 22 '13 at 01:09
  • @dainichi But what the papers show is that in a corpus of spontaneous speech the devoicing doesn't usually occur in loans that don't violate Lyman's Law. So ベッド→ベット and バッグ→バック, but not ヘッド→ヘット or レッグ→レック. (I'm not saying other explanations aren't possible, though.) –  Sep 22 '13 at 01:51
  • I might be mistaken; but, I was under the impression that words like バック and ベット are from the German... Loanwords are not always English... – execjosh Sep 22 '13 at 13:42
  • @execjosh Yes, of course not all loanwords are from English. But that fact isn't relevant here, I'm afraid. (You may want to read the research before commenting. There isn't a robust set of devoiced words which are perceived as identical to a voiced set but are taken from different languages and are nonetheless perceived as realizations of the same word which happen to fit this phonetic rule... That's just silly :-) –  Sep 22 '13 at 13:55
  • @snailboat Yes, you are correct that I have not read the research. Do you know any direct links to papers? It sounds interesting :) Is there anything that would explicitly rule out German influence, though? – execjosh Sep 22 '13 at 14:18
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    @execjosh Here's a 2013 paper by Kawahara, replicating earlier experiments using a newer corpus. In their data, devoicing happened 40% of the time when Lyman's Law was violated (in 438 cases out of 1099), but only 5% of the time when it wasn't (26 out of 518 cases). This seems like a fairly robust difference to me. You can make up your own mind whether or not German influence is the source of a Japanese phonetic phenomenon, but given the parallel in native words and the synchronic nature of the devoicing, I personally don't think it's likely. –  Sep 22 '13 at 14:27
  • @snailboat ooh, data, shiny. I suspect the OP's problem actually comes from errors in an illicit digital file as opposed to any genuine 'misprint' or other effect but the question at least has caused some interesting discussion. – nkjt Sep 23 '13 at 11:32