An interactive diachronic timeline of Ainu historical sound changes — lects as forking lanes, sound changes placed at their estimated time, and the *nia/*ne/*ni chain shift drawn as coupled ribbons. Each item is a claim tied to an authority and grounded in cited evidence.
Everything shown is a CLAIM, not a fact. Reconstructed forms carry the * prefix and an authority tag (e.g. SRPA: *pia) — never a bare attested-looking form. Competing frameworks (e.g. ALTT) are filtered, never overlaid; the SRPA palatal-revision scenario is shown by default.
These changes applied to specific etymologies: *pi family → *ni family →
*) are hypotheses, tagged by authority.Cross-dialect sound correspondences (mostly undated) — a reference inventory kept off the proto-level time axis. Each example carries an honest attestation flag; attested dialect forms render plain, reconstructed forms keep their * and authority tag.
Hokkaido↔Sakhalin (and Kuril) vowel-length correspondence.
規則性2; the long vowel, the Vy diphthong and the short vowel are three dialectal reflexes of one form.
Fukazawa-Ono's 規則性7 is solid (husko, pse); Kasuga's uraye:uray / optuye:optuy contraction pairs are the weakest, unconfirmed as such.
The Hokkaido e :: Sakhalin i pseudo-correspondence Shiratori discusses (Tangiku 2022:330); Shiratori argues類例 are limited.
Sakhalin keeps the paragogic/echo vowel; Hokkaido has the bare coda. Cf. sakhalin/ engine.
A Sakhalin innovation (debuccalisation of coda stops); cf. Chiri 1942, sakhalin/sound_rules.json.
The pa/ca correspondence; cross-listed with the timeline change pa-ca-split (Shiratori derives both from *pia).
Synchronic allophonic rule of (most) Ainu; not a dialect split per se but a pan-Ainu phonological process.
Visible morphophonemically when -i possessive/derivation follows a t-final stem (ramat → ramaci-hi).
The 'mi > ni' change named in the request: a Japonic loanword (mimi-kane 耳金) adapted via *minkani > ninkari. Single etymology — low confidence as a regular change; cross-listed in sound_changes.json as a historical change.
The 'he/ho > e/o' change named in the project request. An Eastern/NE-Hokkaido innovation.
A survey of documented Ainu sound-change phenomena with attested examples, grouped by category and collapsible. Each phenomenon is literature-grounded (carries a source); per-example attestation is flagged honestly. Forms marked unattested (✗) are reconstructions and keep their *.
source: Vovin 1993, A Reconstruction of Proto-Ainu (RPA); reflexes from Tamura 1996, Kayano 1996, Chiri 1987. Cluster reconstruction summarized in WebSearch result 'Vovin had word-initial clusters not in any modern dialect, making the typology more Austroasiatic-like'.
Vovin's most striking and most controversial claim: PA had word-initial clusters lost in every attested dialect. The modern reflex is either bare r- (after *tr-/*hr-) or a CVr- shape; the daughter languages have no clusters. Janhunen 2020 reinterprets much of the 'extra' material as lost stem-final vowels rather than initial clusters (see apocope entry).
source: Vovin 1993 RPA; reflexes Tamura 1996, Kayano 1996, English-Wiktionary (S. Kuril).
Vovin reconstructs a special initial cluster *hd- for the small 'water/ten/bad' set whose modern reflex is w-. Phonetically odd and isolated; one of the weakest parts of RPA. Note this *hd is distinct from simple *d (which gives r-, next entry).
source: Vovin 1993 RPA (systematic '*r (*d ?)' notation); reflexes Tamura 1996, Kayano 1996.
Vovin repeatedly writes r-initial words as '*rX (*dX ?)', i.e. he reconstructs an obstruent *d as the source of the Ainu rhotic, which no attested dialect preserves. The 1989 version had *ð; 1993 has *d. This is the 'r/(t/d)' issue: Ainu r has a defective, obstruent-like distribution.
source: Vovin 1993 RPA (the recurrent '*sX (*gX / *hX ?)' triple notation); reflexes Chiri 1987, Tamura 1996, Kayano 1996.
Vovin cannot fix the value of a proto sibilant/fricative because dialects disagree (s ~ h); he writes e.g. '*sik (*gik/*hik ?)'. He also reconstructs a separate voiced *g- whose reflex is overwhelmingly h-, but seta 'dog' shows s-. The s/h split is the live problem.
source: Vovin 1993 RPA (consistently writes *t before *i); reflexes Kayano 1996, Nakagawa 1995, Tamura 1996.
Vovin reconstructs *t (not *c) in these stems; the modern affricate c is the regular reflex of *t / _i. Conditioning is clear: *tu, *ta, *to do NOT palatalize (*tuu > tu 'two', *tà= > ta 'this', *tÒ= > to 'that').
source: Vovin 1993 RPA (*q symbol throughout); reflexes Tamura 1996, Kayano 1996.
Vovin posits *q (a glottal stop / uvular, per the inventory summaries) appearing medially and in clusters; its reflex is usually zero (vowel sequence collapses) and sometimes a glide. Weakly supported; identity uncertain.
source: Vovin 1993 RPA (barred/umlaut vowels and capital archiphonemes in the reconstructions); inventory summary via Wikipedia 'Proto-Ainu': '8 peripheral vowels *i/e/E, *u/o/O, *a/A; 3 uncertain central *ü/*ï/*ë'.
Vovin reconstructs more vowel contrasts than the modern uniform 5-vowel /a e i o u/ inventory: extra central/reduced vowels (written ï, ö, ü, ë) that merged, plus capital A/E/O 'archiphonemes' he could not assign a precise quality on comparative grounds. The mergers are the vowel sound-laws; specifics are tentative.
source: Janhunen, Juha (2020), 'Ainu Internal Reconstruction: on the Origin and Typological Context of the Affiliative Form', International Journal of Eurasian Linguistics 2(2):181–209 (Brill); possessive/affiliative forms from Tamura 1996.
Internal reconstruction (independent of Vovin's external comparison). Janhunen argues the affiliative ('possessive'/'concrete') marking is 'a trace of the original stem-final vowel otherwise lost in the language, followed by a recently grammaticalized separate particle', so 'Ainu must have undergone a general process of final vowel loss' that reshaped morpheme structure. The absolute (citation) form apocopated the vowel; the possessed form -V(-hV) keeps it. This offers an alternative to some of Vovin's initial-cluster reconstructions. The synchronic alternation is robustly attested; the PA chronology is Janhunen's inference.
Novel, unverified proposals about Ainu sound change, generated by the Delta Miner. These are NOT established findings — they are flagged as machine hypotheses and need human verification before entering the evidence layer.
Do not present these as facts. Each needs human verification + ideally publication before entering the evidence layer. See the README anti-fabrication notes.
NOVEL, UNVERIFIED hypotheses about Ainu sound change — generated by the Delta Miner (comparative/mine_deltas.py, data-driven) + machine reasoning, reviewed by the maintainer. These are NOT established findings and NOT peer-reviewed. Every grounding form is attested (checked against analysis/output/analyses.json), but the historical INTERPRETATION is a proposal to be tested.
2026-06 (Delta Miner over 11,437 analyses; SRPA-context machine reasoning)
Claim The causative/transitivizer allomorphs -re (post-vocalic) and -te (post-consonantal) are reflexes of one proto-suffix *-te, where *t lenited to *r intervocalically, leaving -te only when protected by a preceding consonant.
Risk: Circularity: a synchronic morphophonological distribution could instead reflect grammaticalization of two separate auxiliaries.
related: -e (morpheme, reconstructed SRPA *-de)
Claim Hiatus is repaired differently by boundary type: prefix/clitic boundaries insert glides (w/y), root-suffix boundaries (transitivizer) use coronals (r/t) — for the SAME underlying vowel sequences.
Risk: The coronal repair may be isolated to the transitivizer paradigm itself rather than a general suffixal-boundary rule (then it reduces to hyp-te-lenition).
related: hyp-te-lenition
Claim The contraction ci-e > ce is driven by the same anti-[+palatal]iV pressure as Shiratori's *nia>*ne / *pʸ>*pia revisions: the palatal affricate c absorbs a following high front i before a non-high vowel.
Risk: Shiratori's shifts and this prefix contraction may be centuries apart; the shared 'pressure' could be coincidence.
related: nia-ne-ni-chain, py-reanalysis-pia
Claim ci-e > ce is the clearest remnant of a broader historical compression of the ci- prefix block before any vowel (ci-o > co, ci-u > cu).
Risk: co/cu examples may be lexicalised isolates or parser artifacts.
related: hyp-cie-palatal-absorption
Claim Coda-r assimilation (r>t/_t, r>n/_n) is prosodically bounded — obligatory within one grammatical word but failing across phrase boundaries — so it can diagnose affix vs word in old texts.
Risk: Dictionary orthography may normalize away boundary-sensitive variation.
related: corr-r-type
Claim Apparent a-un > an reductions are a specific morphological coalescence of the locative/relational -un after an a-final base, not Ochiai's (2023a) general historical short-vowel deletion.
Risk: May just be an already-grammaticalised allomorph -n (then it is morphology, not a sound change).
Claim The three-way dialectal correspondence (Sakhalin V̄ : SW-Hokkaido Vy : Central-Hokkaido V) arose from regional repair of older heterosyllabic vowel sequences (*V.i / *V.e), not from inherited long vowels.
Risk: Confusing inherited quantitative length with secondary epenthesis/coalescence.
related: corr-vowel-3way-semivowel, corr-vowel-length
Claim A mined w>m/n_a delta suggests the converb/conjunction -wa assimilates to -ma after a nasal coda (n+wa > nma).
Risk: Highest fabrication/parse risk of the set — flagged for manual text checking.