It is a well-known fact that the following“sound law”(rule of phonetic correspondences) is found between the Kyoto-Tokyo dialect of Japanese and the Shuri dialect, which was the standard language of the former Ryukyuan Kingdom:
Kyoto ki ke ka ko ku; gi ge ga go gu
Shuri t_??_i ki ka ku ku; d_??_i gi ga gu gu
On the other hand, several exceptions are found to this rule of correspondences, but all of them can be explained, so far as the author knows, in terms of comparative method principles.
In this article, some exceptional phonetic correspondences found in Sino-Japanese words and signemes (morphemes) are explained as due to borrowing from Japanese into Ryukyuan. For example,
Chinese characters and«meanings»Japanese old orthography and [the present pronunciation] Shuri forms Chinese pronunciation of the characters
假病«feigned illness»kebyau [kebjo_??_] t_??_ibjo_??_ (chia³-ping⁴)
系圖«pedigree»keidzu [ke_??_zu] t_??_i_??_dzi (his⁴-t_??_u²)
見物«sightseeing»kembutsu [ke_??_zu] t_??_imbutsi (chien⁴-wu⁴)
聖賢«sages»seiken [se_??_ken] _??_i_??_t_??_i_??_ sheng⁴-hsien²
藝能«public entertainments»geinou [ge_??_no_??_] dzi_??_nu_??_ (I⁴-nêng²)
玄関《vestibule》 genkwan [ge_??_ka_??_] d_??_i_??_kwa_??_ (hsüan²-kwan¹)
日限《time-limit》 nichigen [nit_??_ige_??_] nit_??_id_??_i_??_ (jih⁴-hsien⁴)
As contrastively shown in the above table, these Shuri words are evidently loanwords from Japanese, not from Chinese. However, if we adhere to the “sound law”mentioned above, the expected Shuri forms should be [kibjo:, ki:dzi, kimbutsi, _??_i:kiη, giηnuη, giηkwaη, nit_??_igiη]. That is to say that these Sino-Japanese words make exceptional correspondences, which are very difficult to explain.
As the result of his researches to linguistically compare Japanese and Ryukyuan dialects, the author had come to a hypothesis, to the effect that the Shuri dialect has passed at least the following three stages of development:
the A period *ki *ke *ka *ko *ku; *gi *ge *ga…
the B period *ki *kii *ka *ku *ku; *gi *gii *ga…
the C period t_??_i ki ka ku ku; d_??_i gi ga…
(including the present)
If the above Sino-Japanese words would have been borrowed in the period A or C from Japanese, the present forms of Shuri would have had [ki] and [gi] instead of [t_??_i] and [d_??_i]. Accordingly, the only possibility is that they were borrowed in the B period from the western Japanese dialects, where [k] in [ke] must have been palatalized to some extent, as it is so nowadays. The ears of the contemporary speakers of Ryukyuan must have been very keen to hear the feature of palatalization in [k], which discriminated [ki] from [kii], so that the Japanese [ke] sounded to the Ryukyuan ears as [ki] rather than [kii].
Studying the Yu-yin Fan-i 語音翻譯 (1501), the author has revealed that this document represents exactly the B stage of Ryukyuan, and conducting researches into various contemporary and later documents, he comes to the opinion that the B period probably lasted from around 1400 until the late 16th century. He supposes that a number of Japanese high priests who came to stay in Shuri around 1500 and taught the Ryukyuans in Buddhism, Japanese and Chinese classics apparently caused the borrowing of those Sino-Japanese words and signemes (morphemes), which are fairly numerous and firmly established in the present Shuri dialect.

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