Talk:Hachijō language

Major Overhaul
Hello all, I recently expanded this article a great deal based on the information in several sources, the most significant being Kaneda (2001) (which is sadly only available in print) and the 1950 NINJAL survey (available as a PDF here). If anyone wishes for me to double-check some of the content I've written based on Kaneda's book (or anything else I've written, for that matter), please feel free to ask me. It's perhaps noteworthy that Kaneda (who is probably the world's leading expert on Hachijo at present), essentially takes it for granted that Hachijo is descended from EOJ due to all the morphological forms it retains.

However, I acknowledge that a lot of what I wrote is rather messy to look at, so any assistance in cleaning it up or reorganizing would be most appreciated. In particular, I seem to have been overzealous with my notes and the various verbal inflections. LhikJovan (talk) 06:32, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

Writing system
I noticed the specification of Japanese writing system in the infobox, but it gave me pause, as there's no coverage whatsoever in the article about a written form of the language. This is important and potentially subtle to people from the West: for example, native of many varieties of Chinese write in Standard Chinese, which is not just a matter of pronouncing words differently, there are vocabulary differences. Is there an attested written version of the language, or would it be more correct to say that there is a diglossia, and Hachijō speakers write in Standard Japanese (and therefore, there is no widespread writing system for Hachijō per se)? Remsense  留  17:38, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Pinging @Sheila1988, who may know more. Remsense 留  17:39, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
 * I think you may be correct that there is no standardised written form -- but theJapanese scripts have been used to transcribe Hachijo. "the lack of a unified spelling prevents its use in education and media, and might impair the availability of written materials for both linguists and native speakers. Moreover, while Hachijō was traditionally an oral language, it does not mean at all that it has no literature. As a matter of fact, it does, in the contrary, have very rich oral traditions, which include folk tales, songs, theatre plays, poems, prayers, proverbs, riddles, etc. But, while those materials have partly been collected and transcribed, no unified writing system was ever created for them, causing frequent ambiguities and preventing to create a comprehensive corpus of the language." Source Sheila1988 (talk) 19:42, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Sheila1988, excellent, thank you very much! Remsense  留  19:54, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Two things: do you happen to know where I can get the full paper? I've searched on WMF and the like, I'll ask in WP:RX all else failing. Also, from the source, if it is only used to Hachijō for Japanese-language or academic purposes, that usually wouldn't be considered a writing system used for the language per se, since any spoken language can be adapted to any writing system in the broadest sense, though obviously there's going to be overlap and such here.  Remsense  留  20:12, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
 * There is a slideshow here with more info. Katakana and Hiragana have been used to write Hachijo since the late 18th centure. Rōmaji has been used since the 19th century. Kanji is unsuitable because it doesn't indicate how the Hachijo pronunciation differs from standard Japanese. Sheila1988 (talk) 20:43, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Well, Chinese characters do not primarily encode pronunciation. I do not want to get ahead of myself, but I question the scholar's specific articulation of why kanji might theoretically be unsuitable. It makes sense to me that there may be an issue involving conflations, but I would not describe the potential effect as "written code-switching". Does the scholar otherwise have a background in Japanese/Sinosphere lexicography? Because there may just be a bit of confusion. I think once more about vernacular Chinese varieties, which have always been written informally with Chinese characters despite differences in pronunciation and vocabulary usage, and recent orthographies have been created for them to contrast with written Standard Chinese. Remsense  留  20:51, 2 December 2023 (UTC)