Philological evidence for *e and *o in Pre-Old Japanese
Marc Hideo Miyake | Aiea, Hawaii
Many Japanese historical linguists reconstruct a four-vowel system without *e and *o for Proto-Japonic (PJ), the ancestor of the Japanese and Ryukyuan languages. However, a few (Unger 1993 [1977], Hattori 1978–79, Thorpe 1983, Serafim 1999a, 1999b) have reconstructed PJ *e and *o. Until now, arguments for PJ *e and *o have been based on (a) Japonic internal and comparative reconstructions and (b) Japonic languages attested from the eighth century onward. In this paper I test the PJ *e and *o hypothesis using two other types of evidence: pre-eighth century transcriptions and Sino-Japanese readings borrowed prior to the eighth century.
Keywords: Chinese, Old Japanese, Ryukyuan, Japonic, transcription, vowels, vowel raising, historical phonology
Published online: 14 August 2003
https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.20.1.06miy
https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.20.1.06miy
Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
Elmer, Patrick
2019. On the Origins of the Japanese Language.
Vienna Journal of East Asian Studies 11:1 ► pp. 212 ff. 
Jarosz, Aleksandra, Martine Robbeets, Ricardo Fernandes, Hiroto Takamiya, Akito Shinzato, Naoko Nakamura, Maria Shinoto & Mark Hudson
2022. Demography, trade and state power: a tripartite model of medieval farming/language dispersals in the Ryukyu Islands.
Evolutionary Human Sciences 4
Pellard, Thomas
2010. Review of Bentley (2008): A Linguistic History of the Forgotten Islands: A Reconstruction of the proto-language of the Southern Ryukyus.
Diachronica 27:1 ► pp. 170 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 08 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.