Descriptive and Comparative Grammar of Western Old Japanese

Alexander Vovin, Professor of East Asian Languages at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, has published extensively on Japanese, Ainu, Korean and Tungusic, as well as other languages of East and Inner Asia. Among his major works are A Reconstruction of Proto-Ainu (Brill, 1993), A Reference Grammar of Classical Japanese Prose (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003) and Nihongo Keitoron no Genzai/Perspectives on the Origins of the Japanese Language (co-edited with Osada Toshiki, the International Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto, 2003).

• List of Charts; Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Preface; 1 Sources and Previous Scholarship; 2 Script and Phonology; 3 Lexicon; 4 Nominals; Bibliography