Reconstruction talk:Proto-Japonic/nipi

Phonetic shift
I'm curious if there are any other proposed instances of Proto initial shifting to OJP initial. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 17:38, 11 June 2019 (UTC)


 * Probably not. The Ryukyuan forms with /m/ come from *mipi while Japanese nii comes from *nipi. Most likely the original form was *nipi because of labial assimilation; it's hard to see how a shift *mipi > *nipi would occur in the presence of /p/ (a bilabial consonant). Kwékwlos (talk) 16:19, 13 June 2019 (UTC)


 * So the Ryukyuan would have developed possibly as the following?
 * → metathesis + labialization → voicing  → full assimilation  (focusing on common  element, ignoring hypothesized )
 * Or would it have been more like this?
 * → labialization just from proximity → lenition
 * The latter seems a bit odd. Are there any other proposed instances then of Proto initial  shifting to Ryukyuan initial ?
 * Also, where are you getting all of this Proto Japonic stuff?
 * ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 19:34, 14 June 2019 (UTC)


 * From my viewpoint the sound change *nipi > *mipi is likely given the *p. I don't see a reason why the opposite should happen given that both *m and *p are labials. BTW, the first one with an initial *mp is absolutely impossible, as does the vowel length in Ryukyuan. Kwékwlos (talk) 22:06, 17 June 2019 (UTC)
 * @Kwékwlos: Understood re: the problem of the consonant cluster . But what do you mean about the vowel length?  All of the descendant languages have  with the long "i".  Do you simply mean that this was a later development, and that the ancestor Proto Ryukyuan had the same CV structural constraint as OJP?  ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 00:59, 18 June 2019 (UTC)
 * PR had word-medial *w and in some cases *p (such as in *opo > Miyako upu). But in all of the descendants, there is a tendency to drop off the *-w-, so that *miwi becomes mī. In sequences like *-awa-, what you get is usually -ā- or -ō-, the latter only found in Amami dialects. Vowel length is clearly an innovation, since I don't see one in the Okinawan song called Tinsagu nu Hana. Kwékwlos (talk) 03:44, 18 June 2019 (UTC)


 * Revisiting this page after a while. Reading through the above again, it sounds like the more likely JPX-PRO form was, with initial  appearing as a Ryukyuan-branch innovation.  If so, this page should be moved to Proto-Japonic/nipi.  ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 00:54, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
 * I agree, this should be it. For example, the word garden is *nipa in PJ, niwa in Japanese, nā in Okinawan, but myā in Kunigami. So it seems that Okinawan still has the /n/ phoneme, compared to the shifted /m/ phoneme in Kunigami. Kwékwlos (talk) 20:29, 23 December 2019 (UTC)