Talk:乙女

@Eirikr [wotwome] in the etymology section looks wrong to me. Looking at w:Old Japanese#Vowels, no reconstruction would have /woto₂me₁/ → [wotwome] but two would be → [wotomje]. Frellesvig's A History of the Japanese Language also transcribes the OJ form as wotomye. --Dine2016 (talk) 07:01, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

@Dine2016: Ya, I'm not a big fan of over-specificity in the reconstructed phonetics just yet, as there seems to be little real consensus in the literature beyond the fact that the 甲・乙 distinction existed. Sometimes I suspect that the reconstructions may be too limited as it is -- perhaps /e/ had three possibilities, as /e/, /je/, and /ej/, or some such. I've long had on my personal project back-burner a plan to collate all man'yōgana, categorize by reading, and if the reading correlates with Middle Chinese, to compare the 甲・乙 values to the Middle Chinese and see if anything obvious jumps out.

Tangent: for instance, my own manual informal searches just for modern kanji on'yomi show a strong correlation between Korean final /l/ and Japanese final /su/, /ɕi/, /t͡su/, /t͡ɕi/, from which we could start to build sound correspondences, and from there, various native KO and JA terms start to look like possible cognates -- such as KO 벌 (beol) and JA 蜂 (hachi, “bee, wasp”).

For now, I've simplified the the 乙女 entry's phonetic progression to sidestep the issue of reconstructed 甲・乙 vowel values. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 19:13, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

@Eirikr: Thanks. What about showing the OJ 甲乙 reconstructions in the improved {{ja-pron}}, in a similar way to Middle Chinese reconstructions (各家擬音) generated by {{zh-pron}}?

• Old Japanese: ⟨woto₂me₁⟩▼

Reconstructions
Kikusawa (1935)	/???o?e/
Kindaichi (1938), Miller (1967)	/???ö?e/
Arisaka (1955)	/???ə?e/
Hattori (1958)	/???ɵ?je/
Lange (1968, 1973)	/???o?je/
Unger (1977), Frellesvig and Whitman (2008)	/???o?je/
Ōno (1982)	/???ɵ?e/
Miyake (2003)	/???ə?e/

--Dine2016 (talk) 03:25, 17 August 2018 (UTC)

Incidentally, the entry 少女 has more definitions for otome than 乙女.

If it is just the issue of specific phonological values of 甲・乙, and all that is done is s/o2/ə/ (etc.), perhaps putting correspondence tables in an Appendix would be more efficient. —Suzukaze-c◇◇ 06:53, 17 August 2018 (UTC)

• @Dine2016: I'm uncertain why the sample table is full of ??? above. Mojibake?

That aside, I'm leaning towards Suzukaze's suggestion here, of putting the 甲・乙 reconstructions in an appendix, or perhaps just referring users to [[w:Old Japanese#Vowels]], as that page is more likely to be actively maintained. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 17:34, 17 August 2018 (UTC)

@Eirikr The question marks were placeholders as I didn't know how ⟨w, o, t, m⟩ were presented in these works. The table above was meant to be generated by a single line of code like |oj=woto2me1, but if there is no concensus among the scholars then simply linking to [[w:Old Japanese#Vowels]] would be better. --Dine2016 (talk) 12:21, 18 August 2018 (UTC)