Vocabulary
The Kunigami language has some words of unclear etymology, such as Nakijin dialect shintsun (/ʃíntʃún/), which is an intransitive verb meaning "to sink." This word has often been compared with the Old Japanese and Classical Japanese verb しづく shidzuku, which appears in ancient poetry with the sense of "to be sunk at the bottom of a body of water, to rest on the bottom; to be seen through water." However, if Nakijin sincun is ultimately cognate with Old Japanese shidzuku, the two forms must have descended from different Proto-Japonic dialectal variants, because the phonological correspondence between the Nakijin form and the Old Japanese form is irregular.
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