Can anyone recommend some good works about historical word usage in Japanese?
I am trying to determine the rules governing certain vowel shifts in the Umpaku (Izumo) dialect. I can't really see any pattern in the audio recordings that I have or in the Linguistic Atlas of Japan, so my current best guess (and it really is little more than a guess) is that the shift actually stopped being productive a short time after modern Japanese emerged and thus only applies to words that entered common usage before that point. To confirm that guess I need to know when exactly some of the modern words became common.
I am trying to determine the rules governing certain vowel shifts in the Umpaku (Izumo) dialect. I can't really see any pattern in the audio recordings that I have or in the Linguistic Atlas of Japan, so my current best guess (and it really is little more than a guess) is that the shift actually stopped being productive a short time after modern Japanese emerged and thus only applies to words that entered common usage before that point. To confirm that guess I need to know when exactly some of the modern words became common.