Kyushu Old Japanese

[Chuterix]

My name is Ryan Tran.

This is a question about this "Kyushu Old Japanese" dialect.

Vovin (2014) and Vovin (2017) p. 41 mention this, but only in passing. I do not see any "Kyushu Old Japanese" poem anywhere in the OJ corpus, so can someone trace down this source?

[Matt Treyvaud]

Hi Ryan,

I don't know if Prof. Vovin ever wrote about this more directly, but if
you check out "The Eastern Old Japanese Corpus and Dictionary", page 13,
you'll see him say of MYS 16.3865 (from Hizen province), "Most likely it
comes from a dialect in Kyushu closely related to Eastern Old Japanese.
The second independent piece of evidence for this point of view comes
from a poem preserved in Hizen Fudoki... We will address this issue in a
separate publication."

I suspect the "poem preserved in Hizen Fudoki" is the one that is in the
OJ Corpus as FK.11 (and the reason I suspect this is, again, because of
AV! He commented somewhere that it is the only non-EOJ poem that uses
/sida/, which he believed was a loan from Ainu, and this stuck with me
for some reason, although I had to look up its number based on my rather
poor memory of the actual poetic text..)

--Matt

Chuterix wrote on 2023-07-06 8:33:
> My name is Ryan Tran.
>
> This is a question about this "Kyushu Old Japanese" dialect.
>

> Vovin (2014) <https://www.academia.edu/7869241/Out_of_Southern_China>
> and Vovin (2017) p. 41 <https://brill.com/display/title/34865> mention

> this, but only in passing. I do not see any "Kyushu Old Japanese" poem
> anywhere in the OJ corpus, so can someone trace down this source?

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[John Kupchik]

Hi Matt,

MYS 16.3865 is actually from Chikuzen province (筑前国), not Hizen province (肥前国). You are correct about Fudoki kayō 11.

Best,

John Kupchik

[Chuterix]

Vovin (2014) mentions that Kyushu Old Japanese contains only one short poem.

I wonder if it's a poem I could find in ONCOJ corpus that looks like a regular OJ poem.

[Ryan Tran (Chuterix)]

This is what Vovin (2009) said/analyzed, which is translated (poem translation on my own):

In any case, we'll look at the Matsura poem located northwest of Heizen Province, where 志太 /siⁿda/ 'time' appears.

志努波羅能 意登比賣能古素 佐比登由母 爲禰弖牟志太夜 伊幣爾久太佐牟

(4) [For] another one night (3) [is] a time for (1) Shinohara's (2) great princess's child (4) to sleep! (5) [I] will put [her] down in the house!

(Note: I used ONCOJ transcription which replaced 素 with 素.)

It must be clear that this song is not written in Western Old Japanese. First the word yu 'night' must be ywo in Western Old Japanese. (Second, the so2 is written as swo). Third, sa- must not appear before numerals in Western Old Japanese. Fourth, there is accurate transcription of kudas- in Western Old Japanese. Out of all of these, the word sida is used. Considering the facts that are known, this must not be a Western poem, but a Old Heizen Province one.