Marc Hideo Miyake

An attempt to reconstruct the segmental phonology of Old Japanese as spoken in the early eight century. If Miyake is right, it's consonants were not too different from those of modern Japanese, but the vowels were quite different. I shall not presume to judge whether he is right.

Our understanding of the historical phonology of Japanese and other languages of East Asia is pretty poor compared to that of the languages of the rest of the "civilized fringe" of Eurasia, because the use of show more sinographs (Chinese characters) meant that phonetic detail is far harder to recover than in languages written in more phonetic scripts. show less