This study investigates the diachronic development of the Japanese sentence-final particle “wakeda” a compound expression used to convey the speaker's epistemic modality. The noun “wake” derived from the verb “wakeru,” to sort out first appeared in the Corpus of Historical Japanese during the Muromachi period, but its use as a sentence-final particle emerged in the Edo period. Three primary usage types are identified: type a, seguentially placing a reason and a resulting situation; type b, providing an explanation or rationale for a situation; and type c, expressing a paraphrase. Types a and c are hypothesized to have evolved from type b through grammaticalization. By analyzing the Corpus of Historical Japanese, the evolution of “wakeda” from the Edo to Meiji periods is traced, demonstrating how this particle, initially prevalent in spoken language, gradually became incorporated into written discourse.

The aim of this work was to ascertain the factors that led to the appearance of the spelling tt in the Barreto Manuscript, a Christian manuscript.

The Barreto Manuscript (Barreto Shahon, Reg.Lat.459) was written in Romanized Japanese by the Portuguese missionary Manoel Barreto in 1591. In the manuscript, the consonant /t/ in the phonemes /ta/, /te/, and /to/ is sometimes written with the double consonant letters tt (e.g. vomotte [面], atto [後]). Previous studies considered these letters to represent certain phonetic features, such as accentuation or consonant gemination. In contrast, the current work argues that tt was the result of the influence of Latin and Portuguese spellings at that time. In the manuscript, this spelling tt tends to appear in the word-initial att- sequence or just before the word-final vowel. This tendency is consistent with the position of the spelling tt in lexical items in Latin and Portuguese dictionaries from the same period as well as with criptions in 17th- and 18th-century Portuguese orthographic dictionaries. In addition, based on the distribution of tt in the Barreto Manuscript, the spelling tt reflects the Portuguese spelling system of the time, which was influenced by the Latin spelling system.

This paper examines the characteristics of evidentiality in the Tokushima dialect, focusing on the shiyoru form of the shōzen (将然) usage. The present form of shiyoru reflects the speaker's prediction of an event, while the past form shiyotta indicates a counterfactual event based on the speaker's experience. Although the subject's person, the tense of the predicate verb, and the overall meaning of the sentence may vary, both forms indicate the moment just before the occurrence of an event. Since the source of information that serves as the basis for the speaker's judgment is direct information based on signs of events witnessed by the speaker or their experiences, the shiyoru form of shōzen (将然) usage can be considered a direct expression of evidentiality. Additionally, the past form shiyotta is considered to convey a mood expression. It includes the speaker's evaluation of a counterfactual event that almost occurred but did not. Hence, the shiyotta form is seen to encompass not only an aspectual meaning of the shōzen (将然) but also evidentiality and mood simultaneously.