Japanese/Korean Linguistics

Some phonemic analyses of Old Japanese (OJ) include contrasts between consonant+vowel (CV) syllables and consonant+glide+vowel (CGV) syllables, where G is OJ/y/ or OJ/w/. For example, some scholars transcribe OJ with a contrast between OJ/Co/ and OJ/Cwo/. Arisaka’s Law is a set of cooccurrence restrictions on OJ syllables within a root, and in an analysis that incorporates this contrast between OJ/Co/ and OJ/Cwo/, Arisaka’s Law prohibits roots containing both OJ/Co/ and OJ/Cwo/. OJ also allowed glide+vowel (GV) syllables, including OJ/wo/, and it is natural to assume that OJ/wo/ in a GV syllable is phonemically the same as OJ/wo/ in a CGV syllable. If so, Arisaka’s Law predicts that the GV syllable OJ/wo/ should not occur in a root that also contains a CV syllable of the form OJ/Co/, but this prediction is false. This contradiction prompts consideration of alternative phonemic analyses that do not include OJ/Cwo/ syllables.