IULC Publications

Studies in Early Japanese Morphophonemics

By J. Marshall Unger

Old Japanese seems richer in vowels than any other dialect. Using all attested OJ verbs and irregularities in OJ inflectional paradigms, J. Marshall Unger reconstructs a stage he argues should be identified with proto-Japanese (the result of dialect comparisons). He separates the pJ-to-OJ period into stages preceding and following a consonant shift whereby plain voiced obstruents were lost, leaving only nasalized voiced obstruents behind. Before the shift, V1V2 strings occurred only at morpheme boundaries and were simplified according to a simple rule of contraction; after the shift, they could occur morpheme-initially and resulted in new vocalic nuclei.

172 pages
$12.00

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