A New Interpretation of Arisaka's Law

Abstract

Teruhiro Hayata proposed the hypothesis that tongue root harmony can be reconstructed within a specific domain of proto-Japonic. Subsequently, Akiyoshi Kida and John Whitman expanded upon Hayata’s proposal; however, their framework did not account for the mutual exclusivity of *u, *o₁, and *o₂ as predicted by Arisaka’s law. To address this limitation, this paper reinterprets Arisaka’s first and second laws as sequences of sound changes. By integrating philological evidence with internal reconstruction, the strictest constraint of Arisaka’s second law can be reformulated through the lens of Fukuda’s law (*o₂ ＞ o₁ /uC＿). However, interpreting Arisaka’s first law as a series of phonological changes presents challenges, as the recursive patterns suggest potential inconsistencies. These issues indicate that a reassessment of the proto-Japonic vowel system may be necessary.