Humble auxiliaries' in Old Japanese: Javanese derivations, context, and significance

This paper follows on from an earlier paper (Kumar and Rose 2000) in which forty-one pairs of words with CVCVC structure from Old Japanese and Old Javanese were compared, resulting in the first schedule of replicable segmental correspondences between Old Japanese and any putatively related language. Phonological correspondences mapped unidirectionally from Old Javanese to Old Japanese. The semantic fields represented in this lexicon corresponded to innovations which are known to have been introduced in the Yayoi period (rice farming, metallurgy comprising bronze and iron, cloth weaving, particular forms of architecture, and a social hierarchy). The present paper moves on from borrowing of lexicon to morphosyntactic aspects of the contact. These seem to be significant in a number of fields. The paper presents a preliminary study of one of these, i.e. the Old Japanese ‘humble auxiliaries’ and their Old Javanese derivations. It also provides the historical context of this linguistic contact between (an antecedent of) Old Javanese and (an antecedent of) Old Japanese.