Overview

The Omoro Sōshi (1531–1623) is an indispensable resource for historical linguistic comparison of Old Okinawan with other Ryukyuan languages and Old Japanese. Leon A Serafim and Rumiko Shinzato offer a reference grammar, including detailed phonological analyses, of the otherwise opaque and dense poetic/religious language of the Omoro Sōshi. Meshing Western linguistic insight with existing literary/linguistic work in Ryukyuan studies, and incorporating their own research on Modern Okinawan, the authors offer a grammar and phonology of the Omoro language, with selected (excerpts of) songs grammatically analyzed, phonologically reconstructed, translated, and annotated.

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Leon A Serafim, Ph.D. (1984), Yale, was Associate Professor of Japanese at the University of Hawai‘i. He has published articles on Japonic (Ryukyuan and Japanese) (pre)history, and helped edit the Okinawan-English Wordbook and J/K 19. His current interests are, especially, grammaticalization and historical syntax. Rumiko Shinzato, Ph.D. (1984), University of Hawai‘i, is Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology. She has published chapters/articles on aspect, evidentiality, subjectivity, grammaticalization and language maintenance. She and Leon A Serafim co-authored a book on Okinawan kakari musubi (Brill 2013).

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