Omorosausi as a Linguistic Data Source(<Special Issue>Views of Ryukyuan, Views from Ryukyuan)

Abstract

The author's past research has focused on the etymologies of words (omoro, gusuku, teda, etc.) on the one hand, and grammatical properties (kakarimusubi or particle-predicate dependency, adjectives, etc.) on the other, of Okinawan, by comparing the language used in Omorosausi with classical Yamato Japanese. In the present article, I turn to (a) the original meaning of dyau (often written in the literature with the Kanji character for 'gate'), (b) the etymology of urizun (the name of a season around the third month of the lunar calendar), (c) a and wa, both of which are first-person pronouns, and (d) the Omorosausi notation vs. pronunciation of the particle ha. The present article argues (a) that dyau originally meant a lock for a gate, and, (b) through an examination of its usages in Omorosausi, that the original source of urizun should be traced to 'the cleaning (of the air) by being moistened (by rain fallen on the ground)'. Furthermore, an examination of usages of those first-person pronouns that can be classified into the a-group and the wa-group has found (c) that different kinds of words tend to follow a-ga and wa-ga. Finally, the present article claims (d) that those particles written as ha were pronounced /ba/ rather than /wa/ when their grammatical functions corresponded to that of the particle o.