Japanese particles and adverbs were generally called Teniha in the Late Middle Japanese grammar. In the Anegakojishiki, a collection of historical records edited in 16th century, four adverbs, i.e., tada 'only', naho 'also', nado 'why' and itodo 'even more', and two adverbial particles, i.e., -dani 'even' and -sahe 'even', were classified into one group named Tamashii-o irebeki Teniha, and were regarded as important expressions for composing waka. This implies that the editor(s) of the Anegakojishiki recognized that the six words shared a common semantic property, and the similarity between some adverbs and particles were regarded as important for the grammatical analysis of Teniha. Although adverbs and adverbial particles have been regarded as different categories since the Early Modern period, the recognition on the importance of the similarity between adverbs and particles has been inherited to the Japanese linguists such as FUJITANI Nariakira, YAMADA Yoshio, and MORISHIGE Satoshi.

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This paper attempts to re-examine the phenomenon of palatalization on -e syllables in Middle Japanese through diachronic and synchronic research about -e syllables of Kyushu dialects. Regarding -e syllables in Middle Japanese, previous studies have suggested that only /e, se, and ze/ were palatalized, or that all -e syllables were palatalized. However, my research on Kyushu dialects in which characteristics of Middle Japanese survive reveals that the occurrence of palatalization on -e syllables depends on the place of articulation of consonants. This fact suggests that palatalization that changes the primary articulation of the consonant occurred on the coronal consonants (/s, z, t, d, n/), while it doesn't occur on dorsal (/k, g/) and labial (/b, m/) consonants in Middle Japanese. This suggestion is consistent with the cross-linguistic tendency of palatalization and the distribution of Roman writing of palatalized syllables (one of the yo-on syllables) in Christian literature.

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