Contrastive Lexical Studies of Amami Islands Dialect and South Kyushu Dialect

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The aim of this research is to clarify similarities and differences between Ryukyu dialect and Hondo (=the mainland) dialect, which are the two main classifications of Japanese dialects, through contrastive lexical studies of Amami Islands dialect and South Kyushu dialect.Previous studies have simply applied Ryukyu dialect's 'mi:' to Hondo dialect's 'me' (=eye). This research extracted all expressions of eye including compound words and idioms, and examined them.It was found that the meaning of 'me' is abstract in Hondo dialect ; on the other hand Ryukyu dialect's 'mi:' often keeps the function of eyes as body parts. Hondo dialect has figurative phrases which are derived from central meaning, such as "see stars", "have an angry look in one's eyes", "be mad at", look happy, "pay no attention to", etc. Ryukyu dialect, however, has no such phrases. There remains eye function as "mi:turarjuN" (lose eyes → be dazzied) and "mi:?utigikunajuN" (be going to drop eyes → pay attention to".We could find much more differences between Hondo dialect's 'me' and Ryukyu dialect's 'mi:' than we had supposed. Such contrastive studies will be further required covering other parts of body.