Linguistic History of the Forgotten Islands

John R. Bentley is Associate Professor of Japanese at Northern Illinois University. He is the author of The Authenticity of Sendai Kuji Hongi: A New Examination of Texts, with a Translation and Commentary, Historiographical Trends in Early Japan, and A Descriptive Grammar of Early Old Japanese Prose. His research interests are the history, phonology and etymology of Old Japanese, and the literature of the Asuka and Nara eras.Alexander Vovin, Professor of East Asian Languages at the University of Hawaii 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 Figures; List of Maps; List of Abbreviations and Notations; Preface; 1 Introduction; 2 Proto-Miyako; 3 Proto-Yaeyama; 4 Pre-Yonaguni; 5 Proto-Sakishima; Appendix; References