Talk:Amami Ōshima language

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Proto-Japonic *t yields [θ] azalea_pomp

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Is the language actually called "Amami" or is it called "Amamian"? I've been wondering if someone got the name of the language wrong. Gringo300 01:24, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

Inclusion of Yoron and Okinoerabu dialects - original source?

As I understand it, the general consensus nowadays is that the main basis for classifying Amami varieties should be the retention of the high central vowel ï. This would exclude the Yoron and Okinoerabu dialects. I think that part of the problem here is that many modern sources (e.g. Shibatani 1990, Matsumori 1995) have simply regurgitated the "classic" divisions proposed in the 1960s, when it was fashionable to classify the Yoron and Okinoerabu dialects as Amami varieties. It must have been tempting to do so, since those islands belong in the Amami island group in Kagoshima Prefecture, but the proponents of this division method had already changed their minds by the 1970s, and revised their own classification system. I was wondering what the original source was for your classification of Amami varieties.--Markusdow (talk) 23:03, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

130,000 speakers?

I was just wondering what support there is for the statement that the language has 130,000 speakers. Ethnologue lists 10,000 speakers for Northern Amami-Oshima dialect (ams), 1,800 for Southern Amami-Oshima (ams), 5,100 for Tokunoshima (tkn), 3,200 for Okinoerabu (okn), and 850 for Yoron (yox). For Kikai (kzg) it doesn't have a number of speakers, just that the ethnic population is 13,066. It doesn't have a listing for the Yakushima or Tanegashima dialects at all (are we sure these are part of the Amami language?), but given that the combined population for those two islands is less than 50,000 people and that the number of dialect speakers is almost certainly less than that, I don't see any way for this to add up to 130,000, even if we consider all of these dialects to be part of the Amami language. And speaking of dialects, why is it that the main dialects listed in the introduction are not the same as those listed in the Dialect section? --Shiquasa (talk) 17:02, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Phonology info

1) Are those clusters (kj, kw, etc.) intended to represent palatalized and labialized consonants?

2) If so, what to make of [çj]? It seems unlikely to contrast palatalized glottal and velar fricatives with a palatal fricative.

3) What about the "placeless" consonants, these are uvular, right?

4) I imagine the glottal-stop+nasal sequences are mere clusters, and are listed separately due only to the phonotactics of this language. (It's quite possible that's the explanation for (some or all of) the <j>s and <w>s as well, instead of palatalization/labialization.)

Here's the table formatted with such changes:

Consonants

	Bilabial	Dental	Alveolar	Post- alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Stops and affricates	p    b pʲ    bʲ		t    d	tʃ tʃʲ		k    ɡ kʲ    ɡʲ kʷ  ɡʷ	q	ʔ ʔʲ ʔʷ
Flaps				ɺ̠ ɺ̠ʲ
Fricatives		θ	s    z sʲ    zʲ		çj	x xʲ		h hʲ hʷ
Nasals	m mʲ		n nʲ				ɴ
Approximants					j	w̜

That's quite a bit of conjecture required to clean up that table. Does anyone have a source for the phonology of this language? I can't find one in any of my usual resources. — ˈzɪzɨvə (talk) 20:58, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

I've had some trouble as well. I'll try to look it up in the library this week. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 00:58, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure it's anywhere near the actual phonology at all. The entire table seems to be based off of the orthography and romanization used on this website, which in turn seems to be borrowed from the Okinawago jiten (Okinawan language Dictionary) originally published in 1963. In terms of that, the placeless consonants Q and N are not equivalent to IPA /q/ and /ɴ/; the first represents gemination (or roughly a moraic glottal stop), while the second represents a moraic nasal (not nececssarily equivalent to the Standard Japanese one). The rest is pure guessing or confusion with Okinawa & Japanese, and is likely not representative of any of the Amami dialects. I would also be careful, since without any sources, it's difficult to guess whether some of them are clusters, labialized/palatalized/glottalized consonants or even allophones. — Io Katai ᵀᵃˡᵏ 20:00, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Kana Orthography, etc.

I think it would be interesting to provide a kana chart explain how the unusual (compared to Standard Japanese) features like vowels ï and ë, the velar and palatal fricatives (separate from hj), the glottalized consonants, and dental fricative are written in kana. From the Okinawan writing system article, I can tell that the palatalized and labialized consonants are just yōon, but it doesn't explain any of these other features. Maybe this would better belong on the Okinawan writing system talk page, but since it's about Amami in particular, I commented here.

Another thing, the Kunigami article says that Kunigami is also notable for the presence of an /h/ phoneme separate from /p/, which is believed to be the historical source of /h/ in modern dialects of the Japanese language. I'm wondering if Amami's /h/ (since it includes /p/ also), or maybe the velar or palatal fricative, might be like this. I'm also wondering about those two extra vowels, and whether they are related to the Old Japanese vowels now Romanized with subscripts, or if they are contractions from diphthongs (like /e/ and /o/ in some dialects of Okinawan). 130.101.167.239 (talk) 03:53, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Unlike for Standard Japanese, there are no agreed-upon conventions for writing any of the Ryukyuan languages in kana. Some, like many dialects of Yaeyama, may be more straightforward; others, like Amami, with 7 vowels and consonants which just don't exist in standard Japanese, are a bit of a nightmare. Specialists don't agree on a single kana writing system, and the more recent trend seems to be towards using a (modified) IPA in academic literature; outside of academic contexts, most Ryukyuan languages are not written much these days. So it would be impossible to tell you how it's written in kana, because there simply is no agreed-upon way to do it. --ಠ_ಠ node.ue ಠ_ಠ (talk) 02:52, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Phonology

I relocated contents to Northern Amami Ōshima language, Southern Amami Ōshima language and Kikai language. I removed the unreferenced phonology section since it is unsalvageable. Northern Amami is an umbrella term proposed relatively recently by comparative linguists, independently of the speakers' own perceptions. It is customary in linguistics to identify which local community (shima) one investigates. --Nanshu (talk) 09:46, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

Discussion of this at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Languages#Amami_and_Kunigami. I cut the scope of this article down to Ōshima and merged the Northern and Southern articles back here. It was a bit of overkill to have the phonology and classification in three separate articles, and given the commonalities and how N and S were defined in terms of the other, it made more sense to keep them together. — kwami (talk) 00:40, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

Pitch accent marker thingies?

Why are there there weird eyelash-things in the pitch-accent section of the article? Did they mean to use the IPA pitch accent markers? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Shibolet Nehrd (talk • contribs) 23:17, 8 June 2022 (UTC)