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Asian Languages and Linguistics
Vol. 2:1 (2021) ► pp.24–35

On the etymology of the Japanese plural suffix and its possible connection to Korean

| Furman University
This paper presents an etymological analysis of the Japanese plural suffix tachi, Old Japanese tati. I propose that tati originates from a grammaticalization of an earlier Pre-Old Japanese phonological form *totwi, the non-bound reflex of which is the Old Japanese quasi-collective marker dwoti ‘fellow (person), everyone, together’. The reconstruction of a Pre-Old Japanese stem *totwi (Pre-Proto-Japanese /*tətəj/) with quasi-collective and plural function clarifies the possible connection of the Japanese plural suffix to the Korean plural suffix tul (Middle Korean tólh), which Whitman (1985, p. 217) proposed to be cognates but which has since been criticized on phonological and distributional grounds. I show that reconstructing the earliest form of the Japanese plural suffix as /*tətəj/ resolves each of the three phonological issues with the Japano-Koreanic comparison, creates a better morphosyntactic match between the two languages, and rules out a loanword relationship of the Japanese and Korean forms.
Keywords: Old Japanese, Proto-Japanese, historical linguistics, Korean, Japano-Koreanic
Article outline
  • 1.The plural suffix in Japanese
  • 2.Comparison of OJ tati to Korean
    • 2.1Proposal
  • 3.Analysis of OJ dwoti
  • 4.A unified etymology of dwoti and tati
  • 5.The comparison to MK tólh, revisited
    • 5.1Addressing problems in the Japano-Koreanic etymology
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 30 July 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/alal.21005.fra
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