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The online NKD entry available via Kotobank here suggests a quote from the Nihon Shoki, but with no phonetics available -- which means the ariku reading may have only appeared in kundoku notes that were authored centuries later.
I changed the PJ reconstruction of "to go" from *yeku to *iku due to the phonetic shifts that occur (compare Okinawan行ちゅん(ichun)).
I searched the ONCOJ (see here) and got no results for arik-, only aruk- (you have to type the verb stem and without the dash (e.g. search tat for たつ), not the 終止形). Chuterix (talk) 21:43, 20 January 2023 (UTC)Reply
@Chuterix: Thank you for the link to ONCOJ, that's a great resource!
I do a lot with regular expressions IRL. Using the Grep functionality, I find only seven instances of iku, ikan- or ikab-, and ike- where used as a verb (per the ONCOJ grammatical analysis) when searching using this expression:
VB-.*\bik\(u\b\|a[nb]\|e\B\)
This searches for analysis lines indicating a POS of "verb" (VB-), then ignoring the intermediary metadata (.*), then a word break (\b, could be a space or punctuation), and then the letters ik followed by u and word break, or an or ab and not a word break (the \B only matches if the following character is another letter), or e and not a word break. This filters out instances like ikaruga, which is actually a place name apparently.
Meanwhile, searching for instances of a verb in the form of yuku, yukan- or yukab-, and yuke- yields 332 matches.
VB-.*\byuk\(u\b\|a[nb]\|e\B\)
The vast majority of OJP instances of the verb appear to be yuku, strongly suggesting that this is the older form. I also see that two of the ik- variant occur in MYS book 14 (3496 and 3567), and two more in book 20 (4332 and 4374), which I think are both exclusively poems written in Eastern Old Japanese.
@User:Chuterix, revisiting this, grepping ONCOJ for \barik (\b is the word-break marker, ensuring we only find this string where it's at the beginning of the word) finds five hits, all for the term あり衣. See also the NKD entry at Sakura-Paris.
Meanwhile, grepping for \baruk finds six hits -- and all clearly of the verb aruku.
If ariku were the Proto form, we would expect to find that in Old Japanese -- but we do not. Instead, we find aruku, with ariku only appearing with any certainty from the 900s. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig22:27, 31 May 2023 (UTC)Reply
None of the Ryukyuan descendants for this term unambiguously point to an ariku ancestor term.
Affrication of the final -ku is not necessarily caused by a preceding -i-. Compare also *kaku or *tontoku, where the final -ku affricates in the Ryukyuan descendants, despite the lack of any preceding -i-.
The only Ryukyuan descendant for the "to walk" verb that might suggest ariku would be Yoron aikyun. But then, the medial -k- is not affricated -- which we also see for the Yoron descendants for *tontoku (tudukyun) and for *kaku (kakyun). Meanwhile, a preceding -i- does cause affrication in the Yoron descendant for *ika, which reflects as icha, or for *pikari, which reflects as picchai.
I suspect that the shift from proto aruku to Yoron aikyun involved influence of the /k/ and the following /-jun/, causing a fronting of the preceding vowel value.
Consider also the Yaeyama descendant form arugun. I can't think of any clear mechanism that would cause the medial vowel in a proto form like ariku to instead shift to the /u/ we see here. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig01:14, 1 June 2023 (UTC)Reply
