Writing in the Ryukyu Kingdom
After the conquest by Satsuma Domain in 1609, however, this style of writing was replaced by standard sōrō-style Japanese that was written predominantly with kanji.
Other than that, Okinawan features were confined to the recordings of songs to sing, poems to read aloud, and plays to perform verbally, and did not have an autonomous status as literary writing.
Instead, the samurai class of the kingdom was aligned with the literary tradition of mainland Japan that was established during the Heian period.
Modern scholars generally speculate that Zen Buddhist monks brought kana from mainland Japan to Okinawa Island.
[1] During the Muromachi period, Zen monks worked as translators, diplomats and political advisers using a network of temples that was centered in Kyoto and was extended to Okinawa Island.
The Okinawans would have used wote (modern Shuri speech: /wuti/) as the locative marker, but the standard form ni te was used in the inscription.
The obligation marker beshi at the end of the sentence is another Written Japanese feature that was borrowed into the Shuri variety but remains rare.
Although Okinawan flavor is non-negligible, the phrase tamawari mōshi sōrō (an honorific form of "to be given by the king's order"[4]) is a distinctive characteristic of sōrō-style Japanese.
[3] Apart from lexical and grammatical features, a notable characteristic as a writing convention is the ratio of kana in relation to kanji.
An example from the transitional period is the 12th appointment letter from the Dana Documents (1627):[1] 首里乃御美事 真和志間切きま村より 知行高三捨石ハ 南風のこおりの 一人きまの大やくもいに 給申候
[4][2] Except for the use of Chinese era names, the local administrative documents were no different from those produced in other domains under the Tokugawa shogunate.
[5] In parallel with the shift in administrative documents, Ryūkyū's elite oral culture came to be recorded with the mixture of kana and kanji, under the influence of mainland writing conventions.
At the time omoro songs were recorded, radical sound changes that characterize the Shuri speech and other modern South Okinawan varieties, such as vowel raising, palatalization of [k] and [g] before [i], dropping of [r] before [i] were not completed if they had started.
For example, the first block of a ryūka is written as: けふのほこらしやや kefu no hokorashiya yaHowever, it is pronounced as: kiyu nu hukurasha yaStill, this pronunciation convention has non-negilible differences with modern colloquial speech.
The style of war tales was adopted in a more sophisticated way by the Chūzan Seikan, Ryūkyū's first official history book written by Haneji Chōshū.
The testament of Aka Chokushiki (1778 and 1783), which was written in sōrō-style Japanese by a samurai of Naha, enumerated a wide range of subjects to be mastered by his young son.
The Omoidegusa (1700) by Shikina Seimei was a poetic diary, a genre of Japanese literature with the Tosa Nikki as a representative work.
Since the reign of Shō Shin, however, Ryūkyū's sea trade under the disguise of tributary missions had shown a steady decline, which devastated the community of Kumemura.
[9] However, the samurai of Kumemura were assimilated to the Okinawan society to the level that they chose sōrō-style Written Japanese for daily activities.
Tomari Jochiku (1570–1655), a Confucian scholar from Yakushima, is credited for introducing a style of kunten called Bunshi-ten, together with the Satsunan school of Neo-Confucianism.
Higa cited a famous passage of the Analects as an example: The students of Kumemura and would-be interpreters were taught chokudoku and gōon kundoku.
Recalling the years of his childhood, Iha Fuyū (1876–1947) also mentioned gōon kundoku but he referred to it as shima kaigō and stated that it had attracted scorn.
