Reconstruction talk:Proto-Japonic/nəi
Uncertain reconstruction[edit]
We have two pieces of circumstantial evidence for Old Japanese /no₂/: man'yōgana usage, and the single term 荷前 (no₂saki). See a note about that in the KDJ entry at Kotobank (in Japanese).
This lack of lexical evidence makes it difficult to trace if this /no₂/ morpheme is actually the same thing as the /ni/ morpheme found much more commonly. If /no₂/ were simply the original form of /ni/, we would expect to find more compounding terms where /no₂/ appears -- but aside from 荷前 (no₂saki), so far as I can find, all other terms with 荷 as the first element are pronounced with either Japonic reading /ni/ or Sinic reading /ka/.
We must be open to the possibility that Old Japanese /no₂/ is distinct from /ni/. These may just be two different roots that happened to be close enough in meaning to merit application of the same Chinese character. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 00:02, 28 February 2023 (UTC)