Proto Japanese

Proto-Japanese is the reconstructed language stage from which all later varieties of Japanese, including Ryukyuan, descend. It has been studied both as an end in itself (as the genetic code of the Japanese language) and as part of endeavors to clarify the genetic affiliation of Japanese. Based on the state of the field, especially as represented in Samuel E. Martin's seminal work The Japanese Language Through Time (1987), this volume singles out key areas in the reconstruction of proto-Japanese where salient progress has been or promises to be made since Martin. Contributions were invited from scholars working on the following areas: segmental phonology, use of dialect evidence, accent, morphology, and syntax. While the book first of all presents new research which advances our understanding of proto-Japanese, it also gives an overview over the state of the art in the field and its main issues.

Joseph Kitagawa, one of the founders of the field of history of religions and an eminent scholar of the religions of Japan, published his classic book Religion in Japanese History in 1966. Since then, he has written a number of extremely influential essays that illustrate approaches to the study of Japanese religious phenomena. To date, these essays have remained scattered in various scholarly journals. This book makes available nineteen of these articles, important contributions to our understanding of Japan's intricate combination of indigenous Shinto, Confucianism, Taoism, the Yin-Yang School, Buddhism, and folk religion. In sections on prehistory, the historic development of Japanese religion, the Shinto tradition, the Buddhist tradition, and the modem phase of the Japanese religious tradition, the author develops a number of valuable methodological approaches. The volume also includes an appendix on Buddhism in America. Asserting that the study of Japanese religion is more than an umbrella term covering investigations of separate traditions, Professor Kitagawa approaches the subject from an interdisciplinary standpoint. Skillfully combining political, cultural, and social history, he depicts a Japan that seems a microcosm of the religious experience of humankind.

Azuma Old Japanese is an areal term for the two major dialects of Eastern (‘Azuma’) Japan during the eighth century: Eastern Old Japanese and Töpo-Suruga Old Japanese. This volume is an exhaustive, comparative reference grammar based on the linguistic data contained in the Man’yōshū poetic anthology (759 CE). It contains chapters dedicated to the different lexical categories, the lexicon, the phonology, and the historical development. This volume serves to fill the last remaining gap in English language scholarship on the grammar of premodern Japanese dialects, and significantly contributes to our understanding of the historical development of the earliest attested Japanese dialects. It also contains an extensive reconstruction of Proto-Japanese.

A survey of the two main indigenous languages of Japan includes the most comprehensive study of the polysynthetic Ainu language yet to appear in English as well as a comprehensive analysis of Japanese linguistics.

This title explains the use of Japanese words such as wa, ga and mo looking at the rules and meanings of words in their literary forms.

This monograph deals with the reconstruction of the Proto-Ainu language and the problems of its genetic affiliation.

This study describes a diachronic change of the obstruent consonants in the central area of Korea, with attention to ONSET and CODA lenitions. It is intended for students of Korean language and linguistics.

Benjamin Smith Lyman (1835–1920) was an American geologist and mining engineer who worked for the Japanese government as a foreign expert in the 1870s. He is famous among linguists for an article about a set of Japanese morphophonemic alternations known as rendaku (sometimes translated as “sequential voicing”). Lyman published this article in 1894, several years after he returned to the United States, and it contains a version of what linguists today call Lyman’s Law. This book includes a brief biography of Lyman and explains how an amateur linguist was able to make such a lasting contribution to the field. It also reproduces Lyman’s 1894 article as well as his earlier article on the pronunciation system of Japanese, each followed by extensive commentary. In addition, it offers an English translation of a thorough critique of Lyman’s 1894 article, published in 1910 by the prominent Japanese linguist Ogura Shinpei. Lyman’s work on rendaku included much more than just Lyman’s Law, and the final chapter of this book assesses all his proposals from the standpoint of a modern researcher.