Reconstruction talk:Proto-Japonic/mui

Bad move, faulty reconstruction, unexplained and apparently incorrect edits

@Chuterix, you recently moved this page from muy to moy, and then removed the mu reading from OJP, and added a mo reading to modern JA.

About a month prior, you added a ref from Pellard, in which Pellard himself uses the reconstruction spelling *mui, and makes no mention of any mo or moy.

I can confirm the OJP reading of mu that you removed (see the NKD entry for one), and I cannot confirm any modern JA reading of mo (see same NKD link), nor indeed any Proto reconstruction of moy.

Forgive my confusion, but what are you doing with this entry? This is all very confusing and concerning. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 17:53, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

PJ *moy instead of *muy is based off of moya (central area of building?) spelled variously as 母屋, 身屋, 身舎; according to the KDJ it says:

「も」は「身(む)」の変化で、「身屋」の意。家屋の本体をいう
Means "body house" with mo being a shift from mu (body). Said to be the main part (body) of a house.

The Kotobank version does not have this etymology (like many others), and lists the first attestation from the late 900s.

Even I have doubts reconstructing PJ *moy. See Pellard (2013) p. 88, showing a great table for the reconstruction of PJ *muy (*mui). If 胸 (mune, “chest”) (< PJ *munay, seen in Vovin 2010 & 2014) did derive from 身 (mu, “body”, only in compounds), it could provide some evidence. Because if it were PJ **monay, it would've resulted in Okinawan *muni or similar, similar to a comparison seen in PR *mono (< PJ *mənə), instead of nni. This is (probably) also why Vovin reconstructs PJ *muma (gloss: horse; possibly whence Okinawan ?nma?), however a zero-consanant in Okinawan ?nma makes the reconstruction confusing (I reconstruct PJ *mma, but does this only apply to delicious sense (Okinawan maasan)?; I don't know because these are reconstructed word-initial consonant clusters undocumented). Anyways, certainly not PJ **məy, because PR **me would be expected (same PR *me term exists in gloss "eye" < PJ *may).

I forgot to say that *-o- fronts to -u- in Old Japanese word-medially and as mu only appears in compounds, the moya term I mentioned above was to demonstrate the existence of unfronted *-o-.

Pellard (2013) also explains the reconstruction of PJ *koy (*koi; gloss "yellow"), based off the comparative data (also Modern Japanese kogane; gloss "gold"; and some Ryukyuan comparanda). On p. 88. So I compared with this situation there.

I also said in my edit summary that I will add reconstruction details tomorrow (today), but I don't know if this will change.

Cheers! Chuterix (talk) 20:57, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

@Chuterix: Quick and too-short reply (I have an appointment coming up soon 😄) --

I suspect that 馬 and 梅 are poor candidates for exploring Japanese ↔ Ryukyuan cognates and reconstructions of initial /mu/, due to the likelihood that both 馬 and 梅 are Sinic loanwords. Both terms also displayed an apparently emphasized /m/ sound, as if they were pronounced more like /mma/ and /mme/, considering how the む- spellings arose in the Heian, when む was also used to spell ん.

Re: moya, from what I can find, that isn't attested until the later 900s, raising the possibility that any /mu-/ → /mo-/ equivalence actually reflects a vowel shift that postdated even the OJP period, let alone the Proto-Japonic stage of the language. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 22:22, 19 April 2023 (UTC)