University of Naples "L'Orientale"

Graduate Student, Asia, Africa and Mediterraneum

Other Affiliations: Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, N/A
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Graduate School of Global Studies

PhD candidate

Thesis Title: ON THE HISTORICAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN JŌDAI TOKUSHU KANAZUKAI AND RYUKYUAN DIALECTS VOCALIC SYSTEMS

About

The aim of my research concerns the comparative analysis of jōdai tokushu kanazukai of Nara period literary works and vocalic systems within contemporary Ryukyuan dialects, in order to prove and investigate their historical relationship. There are numerous hypotheses concerning the reconstruction of Old Japanese vocalic system and the issue seems still to be controversial. Ryukyuan dialects are quite conservative and show several features of Old Japanese, disappeared in mainland dialects, and their language history may illuminate our understanding of mainland Japanese linguistic changes.
The discovery that certain syllables which are now pronounced identically were given systematic distinctions in terms of different characters in the Nara period works, such as Kojiki (712), and Man’yōshū (759), led to the hypothesis that in addition to a and u, there were, in Old Japanase, two types of i, e and o. The two series of the latter have traditionally been designated by the class names kō and otsu. The theory of eight-vowel system is widely accepted but, in recent times, many scholars have provided different theories regarding its validity. The three main methods used in historical linguistics to reconstruct old stages of a language are: the inspection of written records, the internal reconstruction and the comparative method. As for Old Japanese the most used technique is the first one, particularly the comparison of data in the Japanese written sources with the relatively more extensive knowledge of Middle Chinese phonology. Roy Andrew Miller (1980) was the first to offer corroborating evidence of the eight-vowel system using the comparative method and the method of internal reconstruction. He uses cognate forms from the modern Tokyo dialect and from the Satsuma dialect of Southern Kyūshū, in order to point out the modern evolutions of Old Japanese kō/otsu vowels. With this research I intend to start from Miller’s approach and make a comparative analysis using cognates of five Ryukyuan dialects, one for each group, and Old Japanese words, tagged with their vowel class indications, in order to demonstrate whether the vocalic alternations of Old Japanese are kept in conservative Ryukyuan dialects. If so, I will analyse the diachronic changes occurred and the way in which they appear. Suggestions to use Ryukyuan dialects linguistic materials for improving our understanding of Old Japanese come from scholars such as Hattori Shirō (1959), Murayama Shichirō (1981) and in more recent times Nakama Mitsunari (1998) and Leon A. Serafim (2008). They pointed out the importance of Ryukyuan dialects, insofar as they still keep linguistic features from old stages, but they have not produced any systematic and comprehensive study regarding vowels.

  As for the linguistic sources, I will use IPA transcriptions of Amami Ōshima, Shuri, Tarama, Hateruma and Yonaguni dialects, based on an acoustic-phonetic analysis. Unlike studies in which the comparative analysis is carried out through linguistic sources using different transcriptions, the use of IPA transcriptions in my research offers more consistent linguistic material for a diachronic research. Particular attention will be paid not only to vowel systems, but also to consonantal systems because, through linguistic changes, the element which conserves the complementary distribution has often shifted from vowels to consonants.