Phonological Correspondences Between Old Japanese and Malayo-Polynesian ―A Tentative Plan－

It has often been said that Japanese has a number of words whose forms and meanings are similar to those of southern languages. Izui (1953) cited, for the first time with scientific precision, some 90 morphemes which might be related to the Malayo-Polynesian parent language (MP), and Murayama (1968) was the first to suspect the existence in Old Japanese (OJ) of the MP prefix *ma- ～ *m？-with nasal prothesis, a Malayo-Polynesian peculiarity, by comparing MP *m？-ndak？p 'to embrace' with OJ mu-ndakaf- 'id'. Extending the ideas of the two scholars the present writer not only lists approximately 400 examples under his phonetic law, but also makes it clear that some phonemic alternation of OJ, to which no satisfactory explanation has ever been given, can be explained through similar alternation of MP. For example: MP *abu(k) ~ *dabuk 'ash, grey': OJ awo ~ sawo 'grey, pale' MP * (m)abay ~ *kapay 'to move one's hands back and forth': OJ m-afi 'movement of the hands; dancing' ~ kafi-na 'a dance; an arm' One of the most difficult problems is that of the MP phoneme *γ, which according to the present writer corresponds to OJ 5 initially and to OJ r medially, while Murayama holds that it corresponds to OJy in all positions. When it seems to corresponds to OJ φ initially, this φ is perhaps a second product through an emphatic form or an s-form with a syllable closed with a nasal. For example, ani 'elder brother' <*a-ni <*an-ni <*san-ni <s*a-ni <*sani : MP *γani 'manly'