Reconstruction talk:Proto-Japonic/onansi
Latest comment: 1 year ago by Eirikr in topic Arisaka's law
Arisaka's law
[edit]Is this reconstruction valid? I see the Okinawan form as deriving from a borrowing from Japanese, given the lack of other Ryukyuan cognates. Kwékwlos (talk) 23:10, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
- @Kwékwlos: I am curious about the decision to reconstruct this as *ənansi, for a couple reasons.
- Arisaka's Law states that we should never see ⟨o₂⟩ in the same morpheme as ⟨o₁⟩, ⟨a⟩, or ⟨u⟩.
- So far as I'm aware, man'yōgana doesn't distinguish between vowel-only ⟨o₁⟩ and ⟨o₂⟩.
- Consequently, I see good reason not to reconstruct initial ə-, and reason to reconstruct initial o- instead.
- Separately, the KDJ entry here at Kotobank notes that this was also realized as onasi -- but then again I can only find onazi in ONCOJ.
- There is also a separate form oyazi. The notes in the oyazi entry in the KDJ (linked above) suggest that oyazi may have been from 親 (oya, “parent”) + じ (ji, adjective-forming suffix, "having the qualities of"), while onazi was possibly from 己 (ono, “self”) + じ (ji). This is interesting, and the semantics make some sense. This idea could merit further exploration. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 00:28, 23 February 2023 (UTC)