was a Japanese linguist.

Biography

Born in

Kure, Hiroshima is a Cities of Japan, city in the Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 208,024 in 106,616 households and a population density of 590 persons per km2. The total area of the city is . With a strong industrial and ...

, he received his education in Tokyo. He graduated from the Tokyo Imperial University, now

University of Tokyo The University of Tokyo (, abbreviated as in Japanese and UTokyo in English) is a public research university in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Founded in 1877 as the nation's first modern university by the merger of several pre-westernisation era ins ...

in 1931. He specialized in Historical Japanese phonology and

Historical Chinese phonology Historical Chinese phonology deals with reconstructing the sounds of Chinese from the past. As Chinese is written with logographic characters, not alphabetic or syllabary, the methods employed in Historical Chinese phonology differ considerabl ...

, making important contribution to the studies of

Jōdai Tokushu Kanazukai is an archaic kana orthography system used to write Old Japanese during the Nara period. Its primary feature is to distinguish between two groups of syllables that later merged. The existence and meaning of this system is a critical point of s ...

and

Middle Chinese Middle Chinese (formerly known as Ancient Chinese) or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese language, Chinese recorded in the ''Qieyun'', a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expande ...

External links

Works on-line
1908 births 1952 deaths People from Kure, Hiroshima University of Tokyo alumni 20th-century Japanese linguists Linguists of Japanese {{Japan-linguist-stub