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Doug Daulton
28th December 2000, 17:07
The topic of Okinawan dialects has risen several times within these forums, so I've created this thread to give us a common place for discussion and research.

I raised this issue sometime ago in a different E-Budo forum (before the OMA forums existed). Joe Svinth replied with a laundry list of great resources on the web. Like a dope, I did not save that post and I cannot seem to find it anywhere (maybe that was pre-PHP E-budo).

In any event, if Joe is lurking here (and I hope he is) I humbly ask that he provide those resources again here. In addition, Mario McKenna and Joe Swift know their way around the Okinawan dialects pretty well and I'd ask that they jump in as well.

It would be a very cool thing to begin building an online Uchinaguchi dictionary here.

Doug Daulton
28th December 2000, 17:16
Originally posted by Doug Daulton ...
I raised this issue sometime ago in a different E-Budo forum (before the OMA forums existed). Joe Svinth replied with a laundry list of great resources on the web. Like a dope, I did not save that post and I cannot seem to find it anywhere (maybe that was pre-PHP E-budo).

In any event, if Joe is lurking here (and I hope he is) I humbly ask that he provide those resources again here.DOH! They were right here in this very forum! Apologies to Joe. Here are the links for your consideration ...
Originally posted by Joseph Svinth ... Ryukyuan and Japanese are more closely related to each other than any other languages, but structurally Ryukyuan is about as closely related to Japanese (and about as intelligible) as Icelandic is to Norwegian, and during the Edo era the Japanese considered it a totally separate language. For some bibliographic citations, try http://roger.ucsd.edu/search/dRyukyuans+--+Crime+against+--+Japan+--+Okinawa-ken+--+History/dryukyuans+crime+against+japan+okinawa+ken+history/-17,-1,0,B/browse . A commonly copied sample of a thesis appears at http://www.okinawa.ws/language.html .

The reason Japanese is taught in the Okinawan public schools is that in 1946 the US Army couldn't find enough Ryukyuan-speaking schoolteachers. They thought about using English, but wanted to get the kids off the streets ASAP so hired Japanese instead. Read Fisch's book, in which there is a whole chapter on education. The kids today often talk kinda like Hawaiians, in a dialect comprised of Japanese, Ryukyuan, and English words. Educated folks can switch back and forth with dizzying speed, and like everybody else, enjoy losing outsiders that way. For some academic discussion, see http://www.kagawa-jc.ac.jp/~steve_mc/multiling.html . (Japanese is also increasingly Japlish, with 10% of its vocabulary being English loanwords; see the same article.)

Japanese assimilationist policies are discussed at http://www.jpri.org/jpri/public/op8.html ; you will note that the American separatist policies are not viewed too kindly here.

Linguistically, if you're interested in Ryukyuan's Chinese roots, see also the list of books at the University of Hong Kong: http://library.cuhk.edu.hk/search*chi/dChinese+language+--+Phonology./dchinese+language+phonology/-5,-1,0,B/browse

For the language itself, note the Ryukyuan dictionary (Shuri dialect) at http://www.kokken.go.jp/public/eibun40/s005-000.htm . There don't appear to be any tutorials, though; at least none are mentioned at http://hometown.aol.com/rahammitt/lang.html

Finally, if you read Japanese, try http://www.nii.ac.jp/sokuho/sokyu/CSV/AN00033324/1963.txt

And that's just using the keyword search "Ryukyuan language" on Google...

As for traditions, well, Goju Ryu dates to about 1918. Most Shorin Ryu systems really aren't too much older, as Itosu's innovations changed everything, and those are circa 1905-1915. Everything else is speculation and nationalism, often based on research done by the nationalist Iha Fuyu during the 1920s.

Anybody read Japanese? Those are some books that need to be translated into English, as I'll bet money that they are where all kinds of our modern myths first saw light.
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Joe
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