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Paper short abstract

This paper analyzes nominal and verbal morphology in Ryukyuan languages from a unifunctional, typological perspective. Focusing on agglutination and inflection, it examines morphological markers in the Suri–Naha dialect and compares them with other Ryukyuan varieties.

Paper long abstract

The Ryukyuan languages (RL) are part of the Japonic language family, therefore there are some similarities among the languages themselves. However, we find that their early documentation and grammatical descriptions were heavily influenced by the agenda and socio-political context of the researchers.

Early syllabaries used either the Latin alphabet, or the kanji-kana majiri style orthography in the case of Japanese researchers. The method of the transcription was often inconsistent even within a single work, and Japanese syllabic system is not fully applicable to the phonetic system of the RL. Therefore, the morphological attributes were not presented systematically. Western works on the grammar of the RL (e.g. Bettelheim) often focused on the similarities to Japanese (Osterkamp 2015, Griesenhofer 2015), and the premise of the research of Japanese linguists (e.g. Hattori) was that the RL are dialects of Japanese (Uemura 1995), therefore the methods and the terminology used in the descriptions are based on the traditional Japanese linguistic perspective. The recent descriptions and comparisons (e.g. Shimoji) are relying on the Western typology structures and methods with inclusion of Japanese terminology, which creates further ambiguity.

The aim of this paper is to examine and compare some of the morphological features of RL. With a systematic perspective on agglutination and inflection introduced by the panel, we analyze the unifunctional aspects of the markers and their grammatical dimensions in the Suri-Naha dialect, and then we compare them to the other RL (e.g. Kurima).

References:

Griesenhofer, C. 2015. B. J. Bettelheim 1849: The first grammar of Ryukyuan. In P. Heinrich, S. Miyara, & M. Shimoji (Eds.), Handbook of the Ryukyuan languages: History, structure, and use, De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 81–110.

Osterkamp, S. 2015. A sketch history of pre-Chamberlainian Western studies of Ryukyuan. In P. Heinrich, S. Miyara, & M. Shimoji (Eds.), Handbook of the Ryukyuan languages: History, structure, and use. De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 61–76.

Shimoji, M. (Ed.) 2022. An introduction to the Japonic languages: Grammatical sketches of Japanese dialects and Ryukyuan languages. Brill.

Uemura, Y. 1995. From Ryukyuan dialectology to general linguistics. Gengo Kenkyū (Journal of the Linguistic Society of Japan), 107, 56–86.