An Etymological Dictionary of the Japonic Languages

Project Information

EDJ

Grant agreement ID: 788812

DOI

10.3030/788812

Project terminated on 1 May 2022

EC signature date 13 December 2018

Start date 1 January 2019

End date 30 June 2025

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 470 200,00

EU contribution

€ 2 470 200,00

Coordinated by

ECOLE DES HAUTES ETUDES EN SCIENCES SOCIALES
France

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - EDJ (An Etymological Dictionary of the Japonic Languages)

Reporting period: 2022-01-01 to 2023-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The Etymological Dictionary of the Japonic Languages (abridged as EDJ) was a project managed by Professor Alexander VOVIN, funded by the European Research Council (ERC) from January 2019 till April 2022 and hosted at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris.
As stated in the project’s title, the aim of the EDJ was to compile, write and publish a comprehensive etymological dictionary of the Japonic languages.
The Japonic language family is one of the world’s primary language families, native to about 130 million people, which makes it roughly the 8th most spoken language family in the world - standard Japanese alone being the 10th language in the world in terms of native speakers. This family includes 4 more or less abundantly attested extinct languages, namely Western Old Japanese, Eastern Old Japanese, Middle Japanese, Old Okinawan, about a dozen living spoken languages, and a myriad of sometimes highly divergent local dialects and varieties.
Therefore, the aim of EDJ was to gather, digitalise and systematise all existing data, in order to create a comprehensive etymological dictionary. Thus, the EDJ was to cover all of the Japonic languages, hence the name ‘comprehensive etymological dictionary’.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The method of data gathering used for the EDJ was simple: a bibliography of sources was established for each language, and unified spreadsheet templates were created for each of the languages, in order to have a homogenous data format. Moreover, the entries concerning most of the modern languages in the database include lexical data from multiple locations in order to distinguish local varieties more closely, and ancient languages such as Middle Japanese include separate lexical data depending on the century, in order to see the diachronic evolutions.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The EDJ was a very ambitious project, based on an international cooperation and on the extensive use of digital technologies. The constitution of a global network of experts, serving as consulting team (https://www.edj-vovin.com/project-team) could help to achieve the redaction of at least 651 entries, out of the 2000 planned for the first edition of the dictionary, representing the first five letters of the Japanese alphabetic order: a, e, i, o, u.
The EDJ project represents, therefore, a first historic milestone to fill this gap in the knowledge of the Japonic languages. It could lead to the improvement and further refinement of the existing reconstructions of proto-Japonic and proto-Ryukyuan. More widely, these achievements take part to a contemporary effort to better our comprehension of the proto-Japanese.

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