LinguistCat wrote:
"Vocabulary list for Old Japanese?" What it says on the tin. It doesn't have to be super extensive, but the more terms that better of course. I've found a smattering of vocabulary in different places with different levels of confidence, but I'm just wondering if there's somewhere that has a large collection of it in one spot.
If you mean a corpus, the online
Man'yōshū provided by the U of Virginia has been an excellent resource for me:
http://jti.lib.virginia.edu/japanese/manyoshu/UVA has other titles available as well, as part of their Japanese Text Initiative. Good stuff.
http://jti.lib.virginia.edu/japanese/If you mean a list of unique OJP terms, I don't have anything like that. But combine the corpus options above with an online 古語 dictionary, say the 学研全訳古語辞典 (
Gakken Zen-yaku Kogo Jiten, "Entrance Exam All-Translated Old Japanese Dictionary", focusing on the OJP terms that appear in modern Japanese education) that you can access via Weblio (
https://kobun.weblio.jp/), and you've got a good online setup for getting into OJP.
LinguistCat wrote:
Alternately, is there a good way of back deriving it from Middle Japanese, especially in the cases that o1/o2, i1/i2, and e1/e2 have merged?
If you've studied a lot of Japanese etymologies, you can start to guess where some of these 甲乙 / Type-A, Type-B / sub-1, sub-2 distinctions might appear, such as when modern standalone terms and their bound forms (persisting in old compounds) have different vowels, like modern 神
kami (ancient
kami2) and ancient combining bound form
kamu, modern 木
ki (ancient
ki2) and bound form
ko (ancient
ko2), modern 目
me (ancient
me2) and bound form
ma, etc. But back-derivation of the Type-A and Type-B values from later stages of the language is, I believe, not really possible. If memory serves, the e
1 / e
2 distinction, for instance, was wholly unknown to Japanese philologists until the re-discovery of 上代特殊仮名遣い (
Jōdai Tokushu Kanadzukai, "Old Japanese Special Kana Spellings"), and folks had previously thought that the final
-e on certain verb stems for the realis / hypothetical conjugation (已然形
izenkei / 仮定形
kateikei) was the same thing as the
-e ending for the imperative conjugation (命令形
meireikei). See more on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dda ... _KanazukaiHTH!