ExploringLanguageDiversityin JapanHow Philological and Linguistic
Analysis Can Work Together

IN MEMORY OF ALEXANDER VOVIN
Japan's ecological variety, with no less than six different climatic zones, seems to parallel the panoply of different
languages and dialects that have been attested in the Japanese archipelago. In addition to standard Japanese andits dialects, there exist other Japonic languages such as Ryūkyūan and Hachijō, as well as non-Japonic varieties
represented by Ainu, Orok, and Nivkh.
Information on such linguistic diversity was recorded in a number of written sources, such as the Man’yōshū andOmoro sōshi, among others. In addition, foreign observers also provided insightful evidence on languages spoken
within present-day Japanese territory. Identifying with precision what languages were represented in the written
sources is not an easy task, but in most cases the combination of a philological approach and the tools of historical linguistics might shed some light on the nature of the languages in question. Analyzing specific cases byresearchers who focus on different sources will help to reveal how the careful coupling of these two approaches
might prove rewarding, without denying the importance of fieldwork and synchronic studies.
Centered on the seminal work of Alexander Vovin (1961–2022), the workshop intends to show how this combination could be possible in practice. Professor Vovin had been involved in its planning from the start, and intended tocontribute with a keynote speech. His untimely passing prevented us from including his contribution. This initiative
will also be an homage to the memory of Alexander Vovin and his legacy by a number of scholars who had beenworking in close contact with him or with his style of scholarship as a source of inspiration.

Online Workshop from Kyoto

October 22, 2022
16:00–19:30 JSTExploring Language
Diversity in JapanIN MEMORY OF ALEXANDER VOVIN

Online Workshop from Kyoto

October 22, 2022 16:00–19:30 JST
PROGRAMOPENING

16:00

Silvio Vita (Scuola italiana di studi sull’Asia orientale)
Christophe Marquet (École française d’Extrême-Orient)

16:10

Remembering Alexander Vovin

16:30

Introduction

16:40

A New Look at Old Okinawan Phonetics
and Phonology through the Prism of Haedong chegukki

Paolo Calvetti (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)Marc Miyake (Independent scholar)

17:10

Lexical and Phonological Information on Okinawan
in Chinese Sources from the Early 15th to the Mid-18th Century
Georg Orlandi (Osaka University)

17:40

Conservative Features of Miyako-Ryukyuan Attested in its Oral Traditions—With a Focus on Nikolay Nevskiy’s Research of the 1920s
Aleksandra Jarosz (Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń)18:10

The Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphosyntax of East Sakhalin Ainu inBronislaw Pilsudski’s Materials for the Study of the Ainu Language andFolklore
Elia Dal Corso (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)18:40

A Few Phonological and Lexical Insights on Early Hachijō (1781–1858)

19:10

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Étienne Baudel (École des hautes études en sciences sociales)* 5–10 minutes of discussion time will follow each presentation

Zoom meeting ID

879 7711 4958

Abstracts and further details downloadable fromDirect access from here
https://iseas-kyoto.org/eventi/workshops

ABSTRACTS

A New Look at Old Okinawan Phonetics
and Phonology through the Prism ofHaedong chegukki
Marc Miyake Independent Scholar
The Okinawan poetic anthology Omoro sōshi was compiled
between 1531 to 1623. It was written almost entirely in syllabic kana, a script borrowed from the Japanese mainland.
Spelling variations in Omoro sōshi indicate that script wasnot optimally suited for representing the sounds of Old
Okinawan.
In The Language of the Old-Okinawan Omoro Sōshi: Reference Grammar, with Textual Selections (Brill, 2021), LeonA. Serafim and Rumiko Shinzato utilize those spelling variations to reconstruct the phonetics and phonology of Old
Okinawan with reference to Thorpe’s (“Ryūkyūan LanguageHistory,” PhD dissertation, University of Southern California, 1983) Proto-Ryukyuan reconstruction and the later
Okinawan language.

Serafim and Shinzato (2021, 115) refer only once to the Old
Okinawan phrasebook appended in 1501 to the Haedong
chegukki 海東諸國紀 (Records of Countries Across the Sea
to the East). Although the Haedong phrasebook is in theHangul alphabet and hence a valuable external source ofphonetic information on Old Okinawan, Serafim and Shinzato only cite it as an example of an Old Okinawan second
person pronoun, ?ura. They do not use Haedong to supplement Omoro sōshi spelling as a contemporary written
source for the Old Okinawan sound system.
In this study, I will build upon their work by analyzing theHaedong transcriptions of Old Okinawan to refine their reconstruction of Old Okinawan sounds. This analysis will also
necessitate a slight revision of Thorpe’s reconstruction.

PROFILE
Marc Miyake (PhD, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa) is an independent scholar formerly affiliated with the University of Oregon, theUniversity of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, and the British Museum. He specializes in the phonological reconstruction of ancient Asian languages
and the analysis of their scripts. He is the first to write a phonological and grammatical description of the extinct Sino-Tibetan Pyu
language surviving on first millennium CE inscriptions in what is now Burma. He has an article on the origin of the Khitan large scriptof 9th–12th century CE Manchuria and Central Asia in press and is currently working on a description of the related Jurchen script.
He is the author of Old Japanese: A Phonetic Reconstruction (Routledge, 2021).

Lexical and Phonological Information
on Okinawan in Chinese Sources fromthe Early 15th to the Mid-18th Century
Georg Orlandi Osaka University
This presentation analyzes three Chinese sources fromthe early fifteenth through the mid-eighteenth century: theLiúqiú guǎn yì yǔ 琉球館譯語 (Translations for an Embassy
to the Ryūkyū), the Shǐ Liúqiú lù 使琉球錄 (Records from anEmbassy in the Ryūkyū), and the Zhōngshān chuán xìn lù中山傳信錄 (Report of an Envoy to Chūzan). On the basisof the evidence found there, I will discuss, and eventuallyconfirm, a series of sound changes that have supposedly
occurred in the Okinawan language. In other words, thisstudy will demonstrate that these written sources can help
us to validate the diachronic shifts postulated by experts.
In addition, they also give us important clues on the time
when the sound changes in question likely took place. In
more general terms, the analysis presented will constitutean example of how a carefully conducted philological survey of historical documents that seem phonetically opaque,if carefully conducted, might prove rewarding for historicallinguists.

PROFILE
Georg Orlandi (PhD, Xiamen University) is a JSPS postdoctoral fellow at Osaka University, specializing in historical linguistics,
Japanology, and Sinology. His interests include every aspect of language and linguistics, especially phonetics and phonology,dialectology, and language classification. In addition to language, he is also interested in cliodynamics and statistical analysis.
Some of his recent publications include “On the Four Grades / Four Calls of Chinese Rime Tables” (Historiographia Linguistica,48–1, 2021) and “The State of the Art of the Genetic Relationship of Japonic” (International Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 1 and2, 2020).

Conservative Features of Miyako-Ryukyuan
Attested in its Oral Traditions—With a Focus
on Nikolay Nevskiy’s Research of the 1920s
Aleksandra Jarosz Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń
The aim of this paper is to show how philological sourceson Miyako-Ryukyuan can be used in the diachronic studies of the language, and by extension also in comparative
Japonic linguistics. Following a brief introduction to thegenetic positioning, typology, and current situation of Miyako-Ryukyuan, an outline of the rich oral traditions of thelanguage will be provided. Despite being an essentiallyunwritten language, Miyako is accessible to some degree
to philological-diachronic scrutiny owing to its abundantoral literature that has retained its traditional fixed formsof expression as well as archaic vocabulary and structure.

Among the researchers who have taken on the task of recording and transcribing Miyako oral traditions, the contributions of Nikolay Nevskiy from the 1920s are of particularvalue and are therefore the focus of this paper. By listingand discussing examples of conservative features thathave been lost in the “spoken” register of Miyako, in the final part I will show how such philological data from Miyako
may contribute to the understanding of Japonic history as
well as to the reconstruction of Japonic proto-languages ofdifferent levels.

PROFILEAleksandra Jarosz is an associate professor in the Faculty of Humanities of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland.
She specializes in the descriptive and diachronic linguistics of South Ryukyuan, especially Miyako-Ryukyuan. She is also interested
in historical sociolinguistics, archeolinguistics, language documentation, and linguistic vitality. She was a JSPS postdoctoral fellow
at the University of the Ryukyus in 2017–2019.

The Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphosyntax
of East Sakhalin Ainu in Bronislaw Pilsudski’sMaterials for the Study of the Ainu Languageand Folklore
Elia Dal Corso Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
Collected between 1903 and 1904, the twenty-seven folklore texts edited and published by Bronislaw Pilsudski inMaterials for the Study of the Ainu Language and Folklore(De Gruyter, 1912) represent to date one of the largest andrichest linguistic resources on the Ainu dialects spoken
along the Sakhalin east coast. Despite the unavailability ofan audio recording for these texts, Pilsudski’s painstakingly
accurate transcription allows us to investigate the phonet-ic, phonological, and morphosyntactic features of Sakhalin
Ainu, a language that has now gone extinct. In this presentation, I focus on a number of these features (such as thephonetic status of the glottal stop, the presence of an impersonal-passive construction, and the use of applicativeprefixes) and argue for the immense value of Pilsudski’s
work for the reconstruction and description of Sakhalin
Ainu.

PROFILE
Elia Dal Corso (PhD, SOAS, University of London) is an adjunct professor in Japanese language and Ainu language at Ca’ Foscari
University of Venice. His research focuses primarily on the Sakhalin variety of Ainu and his specific interests include the tenseaspect-mood-evidentiality category, and verb semantics more generally. He is the author of The Language and Folklore of West
Sakhalin Ainu: A Re-edition of Kyōko Murasaki’s “Karafuto Ainugo” with Translation and Grammatical Notes (Lincom Publishing, 2021).

A Few Phonologicaland Lexical Insights on Early Hachijō(1781–1858)
Étienne Baudel École des hautes études en sciences sociales
Hachijō is a critically endangered minority language of Japan, originally spoken on three remote volcanic islands inthe southern part of the Izu archipelago (administrativelyin the Tokyo metropolis). Although it was long considereda mere Eastern dialect of Japanese, it is now receiving increasing attention, both within and outside Japan, because
its classification has produced some debate (see Kupchik,A Grammar of Eastern Old Japanese Dialects, University ofHawai‘i Press, 2011, vs. Pellard, “The Comparative Study of
the Japonic Languages,” keynote speech given at the symposium “Approaches to Endangered Languages in Japan
and Northeast Asia: Description, Documentation and Revitalization,” Tachikawa, Tokyo, 6–8 August, 2018).

alects, Hachijō is fortunate enough to have several premodern attestations in more than a dozen manuscripts, datingfrom between 1781 and 1858. These sources include noless than eleven wordlists, two texts (namely, a letter anda theatrical dialogue), as well as countless isolated words
and names, usually provided in katakana. Thanks to thisdiversity, these sources provide valuable insights to understand the language’s history.
This presentation will therefore be dedicated to introducing
these premodern sources and the linguistic data they provide, and then in the second part, I will briefly discuss theevolution that can be seen in these documents, especiallyin the lexicon and phonology.

Unlike many minority languages of Japan and Japanese di-PROFILE
Étienne Baudel is a PhD student in linguistics at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, and a JSPS fellow atNINJAL (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics [2023]). With a background in comparative historical linguistics,
his research focuses primarily on the documentation, description, and classification of the Hachijō language of Japan. In addition
to a variety of linguistic topics, his specific interests encompass historical linguistics, philology, and dialectology. Étienne Baudel is
Alexander Vovin’s last PhD student, and is expected to complete his PhD dissertation in 2023.

INTRODUCTIONPROFILE
Paolo Calvetti is Professor of Japanese Language and Linguistics at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice.
He was Director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Tokyo from 2017 to 2021, acting as Director ofthe Italian School of East Asian Studies (Kyoto) at the same time. His main research interests are
the history of the Japanese language, Japanese sociolinguistics, and Japanese lexicography. His
publications include Introduzione alla storia della lingua giapponese (Napoli: Istituto Universitario
Orientale, 1999), and, most recently, “Riconsiderazione del concetto di keigo e di linguaggio onorifico:la pragmatica del discorso nello studio e nella didattica della lingua giapponese,” in Riflessioni sul
Giappone antico e moderno, vol. 2 (Roma: Aracne, 2016), and “Strategies of Impoliteness in Japanese
Spontaneous Talks,” in European Approaches to Japanese Language and Linguistics (Venezia:Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2020).