Reconstruction talk:Proto-Japonic/ə

Declension theory

The widespread variance in the Japonic pronominal reflexes may be attributed to a now-lost declension system in Proto-Japonic. For a similar situation, we may see English as having no declensions except for pronouns. In this case, I imagine Pre-Japonic as being a language full of declensions (hence fusional like Indo-European), but when Proto-Japonic began to break apart, no (or very little) traces of declension were left except for pronouns. Even then, the later Japonic languages even lost declension in pronouns (a counterexample would be Okinawan), so that Japanese watashi-wa = Okinawan wan-nē, but watashi-no = Okinawan wā. See Vovin's A Descriptive and Comparative Grammar of Western Old Japanese, page 229. Kwékwlos (talk) 23:01, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

I see no clear evidence of declension of the kind seen in PIE languages. I'm open to the idea of fusion with particles and suffixes, particularly in the Ryukyuan branch.

己 in Old Japanese is spelled ⟨ono₂⟩, and /o₂/ comes from Proto-Japonic /ə/, not /u/.

Arisaka's law states that /o₁/ doesn't appear with /o₂/ within the same morpheme. So either the initial /o/ in ⟨ono₂⟩ is ultimately attributable to ⟨o₂⟩, or there was a neutral /o/, or the initial /o/ and the following /no₂/ are separate morphemic units. The latter might fit if this /no₂/ is the same as the genitive particle. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 21:59, 23 March 2023 (UTC)

@Kwékwlos, your edit comment mentioned: "OJ has /i-/ as a second person pronoun (found in /i-masi/), which would match with Ryukyuan */e-/ and hence allow for a PJ *e."

Unfortunately, the Kotobank version of the NKD entry here doesn't include the etymology. A different edition I have to hand describes this as:

「います(坐)」の名詞化だが、敬意は薄い。

Nominalization of 坐す (imasu, honorific copula), but honorific sense is weak.

The initial い is described in Daijisen as an intensifier, not a pronoun. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 19:38, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

Re: "Japanese watashi-wa = Okinawan wan-nē, but watashi-no = Okinawan wā", that's not matching what I can find in Jlect, for instance. Various points, as described at https://www.jlect.com/entry/845/wan/:

• Okinawan wan is cognate with Japanese 我 (ware), not 私 (watashi).
• Okinawan wan-nē is indeed the topical form and a match for Japanese 我は (ware wa). However, the genitive / possessive for the Okinawan is wan nu, which we'd expect from Japanese ware → Okinawan wan, and Japanese no → Okinawan nu.
• I cannot find any Okinawan term wā that is a pronoun: https://www.jlect.com/search.php?r=waa&l=all&group=words

There is Kagoshima wā, apparently their reflex for 我 (ware), or perhaps a shift from older Old Japanese 吾・我 (wa). But the Okinawan terms are unrelated: "wa (suprise); granny; width; one's inner thoughts; pig; too much; mulberry".

Separately, I find it quite odd that you are calling ənə the accusative, and ə / e the genitive. Where are you getting this? The only nə ending in anything attested as Japonic is reflected in Old Japanese 之・乃 (no₂), modern Japanese の (no), which would make ənə the genitive. It's also unclear how you propose that the nominative ə is distinct from the genitive ə. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 23:07, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

@Kwékwlos Chuterix (talk) 04:33, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

See here: https://okinawago.app/definition/oki2yamato/%E3%83%AF%E3%83%BC. I will add more soon Chuterix (talk) 00:55, 19 November 2023 (UTC)