Historical Study on the Vowels in Izumo-Nita Japanese

Abstract

Based on the comparison with Old Japanese (OJ), in Izumo-Nita Japanese, which is spoken around the southern part of the Izumo area in Shimane prefecture, three major sound changes are reconstructed: (1) the centralization of high vowels *u, *i > ɨ, (2) the lowering of high vowels *u > o, *i > e, and (3) r-deletion before high vowels. In most cases, forms that appear in OJ are reconstructed as proto forms, from which the forms of Nita could have been derived through the three changes above. From the viewpoint of the sound correspondences between Nita and OJ, however, three forms are considered exceptions: kusoo “medicine,” sɨrosɨ “mark,” soso “cuff.” Referring to previous studies, the mid-high vowels “o” in these forms are thought to be the remnants of *o in proto-Japanese, and they suggest that the mid-vowel raising *o > u, which Hattori (1978–79 [2018]) assumed occurred in OJ, would not have occurred in Nita. In other mainland Japanese dialects, there are what appear to be remnants of *o and *e from proto-Japanese that were lost in the central dialects. Re-examining them from a comparative linguistic perspective is one of the future tasks in this field.