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This question refers to the hiragana notation of different syllables, where
you indicate the "soft-spoken" or "hard-spoken" variants of syllables by
marking them with a small circle or double strokes. So for instance く would
become ぐ where "g" is a "voiced" version of "k" and a lot of languages make
that distinction between "voiced" and "unvoiced" consonants.

Now to my question: How does "b" correspond to a voiced version of "h"? In my
understanding, the sounds originate from very different locations in the vocal
apparatus - "h" being just the sound of breathing out with some tension
created in the throat or with the tongue while "p" and "b" originate from the
lips.

Why does the Japanese language e.g. refer to ぼ as a voiced ほ?
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pronunciation phonology rendaku
Deriving the "p" and "b" sound from "h"
### /h/ is from original *p

The Japanese fricative /h/ is reconstructed as coming from earlier *p (a
voiceless labial stop; "labial" is a phonetic term for consonants pronounced
with the lips). You can read more about this in books or articles about the
phonology and phonetics of Old Japanese; Wikipedia mentions it in the "[Old
Japanese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Japanese#Consonants)" article.

The development is as follows.

First, original *p developed to a voiceless labial fricative [ɸ].

Between vowels, [ɸ] eventually was voiced, which caused it to merge with the
voiced labial approximant /w/. And /w/ in turn was eventually lost before any
vowel except for /a/. There is an isolated remnant of those sound changes in
the irregular modern spellings of the particles は /wa/ and へ /e/, which use
the hiragana for "ha" and "he". Pre-reform spellings have many more examples
of "h"-series kana being used in the middle of words that aren't pronounced
with /h/ in modern Japanese. For more details on this, see Boaz Yaniv's answer
to the following question: [Why are the particles “は” (ha⇒wa), “へ” (he⇒e), and
“を” (wo⇒o) not spelled
phonetically?](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/379)

In word-initial position, the voiceless fricative [ɸ] remained, but it ended
up losing its labial quality before any vowel except for /ɯ/, causing it to
develop further to [h] (some modern Japanese speakers have [h] even before
/ɯ/). It's not too uncommon for fricatives to lose their original place
articulation and become [h]; this sound change is called "debuccalization" and
applied in a similar manner in Spanish, turning Latin _f_ in most positions to
_h_ (which then ended up being lost completely, so Latin _factum_ corresponds
to Spanish _hecho_ [ˈet͡ʃo]). We have evidence for the pronunciation [ɸ]
originally being used before all vowels in the form of the _[Nippo
Jisho](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nippo_Jisho),_ a Japanese–Portuguese
dictionary from 1603 that uses the spellings "fa", "fi", "fu", "fe", and "fo"
to represent the Japanese pronunciation.

### Words with /p/ in modern Japanese

The plosive /p/ came to be a separate phoneme from /h/ through certain
processes that I don't understand very well. My understanding is that modern
Japanese words with /p/ usually fall into one of the following three
categories:

  * onomatopoeic or mimetic words, where the plosive sound [p] seems to have been used for some reason (maybe it somehow was felt to represent the concept better). Example: ぴかぴか _pikapika_ , related to the verb ひかる _hikaru_ (光る).

  * words where [p] is part of a geminate cluster [p.p] /Qp/. Old Japanese did not have geminate clusters; they only came to exist in Middle Japanese. Syllables ending in consonants were introduced in words from Chinese, and in certain positions, the syllable-final consonant combined with a following consonant to become a geminate. For example, 一匹 is pronounced いっぴき _ippiki_ because the first part, 一, comes from Chinese and was originally pronounced as a single syllable ending in the consonant *t. The combination *tp turned into the geminate [p.p].

In the Middle Japanese period, geminates also developed in certain native
Japanese words from phonological processes like contraction or lengthening. I
don't know enough to give a summary, but one example is 河童 (かっぱ _kappa_ )
which [Wiktionary](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%B2%B3%E7%AB%A5#Japanese)
says is contracted from an original form _kapawa **r** a **p** a_ (→
/kawawappa/ → /kappa/).

  * words where [p] is part of a moraic nasal + voiceless stop cluster [m.p] /Np/. Voiceless stops don't occur in this position in native Japanese words (Rice 126). But they can occur in words that come from Chinese, such as 散歩, which is pronounced さんぽ _sanpo_ (Rice 128). Kumagai lists many more examples in (1c) that show that [p] in this context corresponds to [h] elsewhere.

As you can see, words pronounced with /p/ in any of these categories often are
related to words pronounced with /h/, as with _ぴかぴか_ _pikapika_ and ひかる
_hikaru,_ いっぴき _ippiki_ and ひき _hiki,_ さんぽ _sampo_ (散歩) and ほ _ho_ (歩). So
there is some benefit to writing syllables starting with /p/ with modified
versions of the kana for syllables starting with /h/.

### How /b/ is related

Because of the historical development of /h/ from *p, the sound /b/ acts as
the voiced counterpart to /h/ for the purposes of certain sound changes.

For example, it is possible for /h/ to correspond to /b/ after a moraic nasal.
Apparently, this is usual for native Japanese words: Kumagai 2017 gives the
example _hun_ 'to step on' + _haru_ 'stretch' -> _hunbaru_ 'stand firm' (1e,
page 4). Martin 2004 indicates that _hun_ here is a contraction of _humi_ ([p.
401](https://books.google.com/books?id=SszxbMtHbs8C&pg=PA401&lpg=PA401&dq=%22hunbaru%22)),
which seems to be a form of the verb ふむ (踏む).

The sound /h/ also turns to /b/ in the context of _rendaku_ (voicing of the
initial consonant of a word when it is the final element of a compound). The
historical development of _rendaku_ seems to be a bit obscure, but one
hypothesis is that it originally involved the absorption of a preceding nasal
consonant originally derived from the particle _no,_ or possibly in some cases
_ni_ (Vance 338). However, in modern standard Japanese, _rendaku_ can be
interpreted as just a morpho-phonological rule that turns voiceless consonants
into the corresponding voiced ones in compounds (subject to certain
complicated restrictions).

### Sources:

  * Kumagai, Gakuji. 2017. "[Testing the OCP-labial effect on Japanese rendaku](https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003290)"

  * Martin, Samuel E. 2004. _A Reference Grammar of Japanese._

  * Rice, Keren. 1996. "Japanese NC clusters revisited: is postnasal voicing redundant?"

  * Vance, Timothy J. "On the Origin of Voicing Alteration in Japanese Consonants". _Journal of the American Oriental Society_ Vol. 102, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1982), pp. 333-341.
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answer