page_title: Writing in the Ryukyu Kingdom
section_title: Recordings of oral performance
hierarchical_section_title: Writing in the Ryukyu Kingdom / Recordings of oral performance
caption_attribution_description: English: Taichū 日本語: 袋中上人像、京都府檀王法林寺蔵、尚寧王筆。
context_page_description: The Ryukyu Kingdom on Okinawa Island used various writing conventions, all of which were markedly different from spoken registers. A unique feature of Ryūkyū's writing conventions is that in the Old Ryūkyū period, it developed a predominantly kana writing convention that was based on sōrō-style Written Japanese but exhibited heavy Okinawan influence. After the conquest by Satsuma Domain in 1609, however, this style of writing was replaced by standard sōrō-style Japanese that was written predominantly with kanji. Other than that, Okinawan features were confined to the recordings of songs to sing, poems to read aloud, and plays to perform verbally, and did not have an autonomous status as literary writing. Instead, the samurai class of the kingdom was aligned with the literary tradition of mainland Japan that was established during the Heian period.
context_section_description: The Omoro Sōshi (1531–1623) was the first systematic attempt to record songs. The song at the very beginning of the anthology, for example, was:
  あおりへやかふし
  一 きこゑ大きみきや
     おれてあすひよはれは
     たいらけてちよわれ
  又 とよむせたかこか
  又 しよりもりくすく
  又 またまもりくすく
  The first line specifies the melody (the melody of Aoriyae) while the special characters "一" and "又" are used for flow control. Kana was chosen to precisely record the oral tradition. Only 51 unique kanji were used in the song part of the Omoro Sōshi. Some songs were accompanied by notes that were written in Written Japanese. Because the Omoro Sōshi was enigmatic even to the Okinawan elites of the day, a dictionary named Kon-kōken-shū was compiled in 1711, where each archaic word is described in Written Japanese, with extensive references to Japanese classics such as the Tale of Genji and the Tales of Ise.
  In parallel with the shift in administrative documents, Ryūkyū's elite oral culture came to be recorded with the mixture of kana and kanji, under the influence of mainland writing conventions. In addition, the relationships between spelling and pronunciation became complicated. At the time omoro songs were recorded, radical sound changes that characterize the Shuri speech and other modern South Okinawan varieties, such as vowel raising, palatalization of [k] and [g] before [i], dropping of [r] before [i] was not completed if they had started. In contrast, ryūka songs and poems and kumi odori plays have significant gaps between spelling and pronunciation. For example, the first block of a ryūka is written as:
  けふのほこらしやや
  
   kefu no hokorashiya ya
  However, it is pronounced as:
  kiyu nu hukurasha ya
  Still, this pronunciation convention has non-negilible differences with modern colloquial speech. In the modern Shuri speech, the first word, meaning "today", is pronounced as [t͡ɕuː], not [kiju].
caption: King Shō Nei's 1611 portrait of Taichū, along with an inscription, from the Kyoto temple of Dannōhōrin-ji (ja), deposited at Kyoto National Museum
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