Jeroen van de Weijer, born in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, in 1965. Ph.D. from Leiden University. Assistant Professor at the Linguistics Department, Leiden University.
Fellow (1 September 2002 – 30 June 2003)
During this year, I looked at various voicing and devoicing processes in Japanese, paying particular attention to historical background, dialectal diversity, phonetic experiment, and phonological analysis. Both voicing processes in consonants (such as sequential voicing, or Rendaku) and vowels (such as vowel devoicing) were examined. I acquired a great deal of information on this subject, partly through reviewing less well-known work by Japanese scholars, partly through new database research, and partly through phonetic experiment, carried out in cooperation with Japanese and other scholars. I also explored the parallels between certain aspects of the Japanese phonological system and aspects of the Dutch phonological system, and found some striking resemblances. I would like to explore these parallels in more detail in the future.