User:Chuterix/About RyukyuanGeneric

This page deals with the considerations on Wiktionary for the Okinawan language.

Dialects
The commonly used dialect in Okinawan is Shuri-Naha. If any other dialect is listed, please specify it with.

Northern Okinawa dialects belong to the Kunigami language (xug), not here.

Orthography
Historically, the Okinawan language was written in the pre-script reform hiragana alphabet, with some logographic spellings.

There is no general consensus for a orthographic system for Ryukyuan languages. Sometimes, the language will be written in katakana. For example, Hirayama Teruo (平山照男) 1992-1994's 現代日本語方言大辞典 (Dictionary of Japanese Dialects) spells entries in a katakana format, and the Ajima site (accessible here) uses katakana for transliterating Okinawa. For the time being, the entries should be transliterated in katakana, without any kanji spelling whatsoever. For example,.

The transliteration uses 's transcription; it is similar to the modified Hepburn romanization, but all long vowels are represented by a double vowel (e.g. ).

Prosody
The Shuri tone accent has two tones, the former marked with (1), and the latter marked as (0).
 * (1): The word is accented until the third mora. In a disyllabic word, the final accent is on the first mora.
 * (0): The word has an unaccented tone. Sometimes there will be a pitch drop in some words (especially compounds; c.f. ), so it is assumed to be a high accent of the entire mora.

Entries
The head should be (replace html with any part-of-speech).