Japanese grammatical features such as particles, auxiliary verbs, and suffixes were classed as teniwoha and gradually became recognised as important for the writing of Waka. During the Middle Ages, specialist books on teniwoha appeared. The esoteric collection of works known as the Anegakojishiki is a representative example of this type of literature. In this essay, the yasumenorui, which is thought to have played an active role in the raising of awareness of teniwoha, is considered with reference to the kanawoyasumurukoto fascicle of the Anegakojishiki. It is found that the version of yasumenorui written in the Middle Ages, which is usually taken as representative of the Anegakojishiki, borrows heavily from the Early Middle Ages version of the same, and that the two are not completely identical. It is argued that the difference was a result of the deepening of teniwoha consciousness, and a shift in the role of Japanese song occurring at that time. That is, while the Early Middle Ages yasumenorui was used as a basis for the interpretation of ancient Japanese Language and traditional song, during the Middle Ages yasumenorui became recognised as a guide to producing Waka.

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There are three purposes for this paper. The first one (section one) is the theoretical placement of glottograms, which is a convenient technique to show geographical and generational differences of dialectal phenomena at the same time. Here the time dimension of linguistic geography is characterized as "unreal time", in contrast to the "apparent time" of age differences and the "real time" of surveys in the past and historical documents. The second purpose (sections two and three) is the presentation of new data on the speed of the geographical diffusion of dialectal phenomena based on the change from kinka to ganpo (deaf) in Yamagata prefecture. Two old dialect glossaries are cited and contrasted with a dialect map; generational differences in a glottogram are also compared. The speed of diffusion per year is estimated to be as slow as 0.1km/y or 0.4km/y. The last purpose (section four) is to explain the geographical diffusion of dialects and the standard Japanese using a revised and enlarged version of the "umbrella model". The older model was designed to explain the present state of standardization and New Dialect. The newer one includes past diffusion from Kyoto. This paper is also intended as a step towards the development of "Age-Linguistics".

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The aim of this study is to give the definition of the word class adjective in Irabu Ryukyuan (henceforth Irabu), a north-west variety of Miyako Ryukyuan. It is well known among Ryukyuan linguists that Miyako Ryukyuan has a wide range of word forms that encode an 'adjectival' meaning, i.e. the compound form with the formal noun munu, the reduplicated form, and the inflected form, all of which have been referred to as 'adjectives' based on their semantic characteristics. Based on both language-internal criteria (morphosyntactic criteria) and typological criteria (functional criteria, i.e. cross-linguistically recurrent function of adjective), I will show that the reduplicated form is the only candidate for the adjective class in Irabu, contrary to the traditional view on 'adjectives' in the literature where the reduplicated form has always been treated as a secondary or special kind of adjective.

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The main topic of this paper is the reading boundaries of the Kammuryojukyochu (A Buddhist scripture read by Shinran following the Chinese word-order according to Sino-Japanese readings). From the perspective of reading boundaries, there are two typical features in the Kammuryojukyochu. 1) Boundaries are sometimes irrelevant to the formation of Japanese words. Japanese word beginnings do not always correspond to the word beginnings of Chinese texts. 2) Boundaries sometimes disappear between the 1st and 2nd Chinese characters. This may be related to the tendency of Japanese words of Chinese origin to consist of two-character compounds. These features of Chinese reading could have been not simply Shinran's personal habit but a custom in medieval Sino-Japanese. Although texts read according to Go pronunciation have been studied in term of their "purity", attention should also be paid to these particular Japanizations.

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In this paper, Yaketsusho owned by Zuishin-in Temple is discussed. It was written by the prolific writer Shukaku Priest Imperial Prince, who took an active part in and around Ninna-ji Temple at the beginning of the Kamakura Era, during a time of behind-the-curtain politics by a retired emperor. Yaketsusho was written in the form of a question-and-answer dialogue between Shukaku and Shaken "勝賢" at Daigo-ji Temple. It uses a mixture of katakana, hiragana and manyogana, which was unusual at that time. We mainly discuss the characteristics of the Japanese language in the "questions" Shukaku asked often referring to the "answers" by Shaken. Shukaku tried to represent the colloquial style in his "questions" by using unique ways of writing, although the language in "questions" may be categorized, strictly speaking, as written language. Consequently, the colloquial language used by Shukaku in "questions" is to be found parallel to that in other materials at that time. Thus Yaketsusho provides invaluable linguistic material, which provides us with the chance to reexamine the colloquial range and linguistic differences in individual usage at the beginning of the Kamakura Era.

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With so adnominal form constructions in Ancient Japanese, arguments, such as the case marker wo, seldom come between the postpositional word so and the predicate. However, ga and no, and the emphatic particle ha are exceptions to this and do often come between so and the predicate. But in the case of ya and ka which are similar constructions to so, ha seldom comes between ya(ka) and the predicate. This study examined this phenomenon as follows. First, the prominence from using so constitutes part of the predicate through its proximity to the predicate. It is primarily characterized by its inclusion of the predicate as a focus. When the argument is out of the focus, case markers do not come just before so or between so and the predicate. Second, so often attaches to the argument. Consequently, it can be deduced that arguments come between so and the predicate infrequently.

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