Reconstruction talk:Proto-Japonic/patu

Cromulence?
I can find no evidence of this in Old Japanese. The first cite I can find is the /  completed in 1119, well past the Old Japanese stage. I suspect that Old Japanese patu never existed, and that the modern Japanese noun is an orthographic shift from Chinese derivation, modern shinjitai.

Notably, purportedly related terms like 🇨🇬 all derive from root, which is probably related to root , as in modern terms like 🇨🇬. There is no mechanism to explain how this would be related at all to. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 18:21, 14 October 2020 (UTC)


 * Later on, I found the term, attested since the late 900s, c.f. KDJ entry at Kotobank, as well as what may be base form (or abbreviated form?) , attested since the  completed in 759. This opens up more possibilities.  ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 05:46, 19 February 2023 (UTC)


 * Also: See Talk:初. The KDJ entry seems to be deficient.  Then again, see below: unclear if OJP patu is this same term.
 * Digging around in ONCOJ now (props to for bringing that site to my attention 😄), searching for   finds a number of likely instances.  However, it is unclear from the syntax if this might be pa ("edge, beginning") + tu (genitive / appositive particle).  If so, this could either be a separate term, or it might be that noun  attested since the 1100s is in fact a later reinterpretation of this same pa + tu.
 * I cannot look into this any further at the moment. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 06:25, 19 February 2023 (UTC)
 * The ONCOJ Dictionary lists patu here with a search. It is only seen in compounds. It is first attested in the Kojiki of 712.
 * The patu is surely glossed as "first". 29 attestations. Chuterix (talk) 16:35, 19 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes, no opposition to the gloss, nor to its existence.
 * I do believe that modern is a direct descendant of this OJP patu.  My concern is about determining exactly what this OJP patu really is.
 * This string as it appears in Old Japanese is not unambiguously the same thing as modern noun, syntactically speaking. For the modern term, we have copious attestations of  +  , clearly demonstrating usage as a noun.  Meanwhile, in OJP, it looks like we only have instances of  followed immediately by a noun, where the  might well be the OJP genitive / appositive particle, rather than an integral part of the term.  This could support an analysis of patu as pa ("edge of something in space; edge of something in time: beginning, end") + tu (genitive / appositive particle), aligning with an analysis of pazimu / pazime- as this same pa ("edge: beginning, end") + simu / sime- (c.f. modern.
 * I also note that the only Ryukyuan examples that we currently have for this, at 初, are all of this same 初 +  compounding pattern -- which could again be parsed as deriving from pa + particle tu + , if not themselves just borrowings in toto from mainland Japanese.
 * Are there any published authors who trace modern 🇨🇬 to a Proto-Japonic term *patu? If so, I would love to see their reasoning for treating this as an integral term.  If not, if no one else is writing about this and this is purely a Wiktionary term, I am quite concerned that we may be inventing phantoms. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 18:13, 21 February 2023 (UTC)