In Old Japanese, about half of the syllables have a Type A (甲類) and a Type B (乙類) version, for example ko, which is then transliterated as either ko1 and ko2. Similarly, there exists a mo1 and mo2 (in Kojiki only).
Now I won't ask why it is like that, because there are only theories on it (possibly they were pronounced differently), but my question is rather how they figured it out that most syllables have two versions. How can this distinction be recognized within the found Old Japanese texts? They're written in Classical Chinese (but presumably read in Japanese reading order [kanbun]), so how can they derive two distinct syllables from the Chinese characters? Where there like, two different hànzì which where expected to be pronounced roughly the same, so that they found that they must be two different kinds of syllables? If so, can someone maybe give me an example? How would the syllables ko1 and ko2 (or any other pairing) in Old Japanese be written?
Also, how did they even derive a transcription of the syllables if all they had were the Chinese characters in texts like Kojiki and Nihonshoki? Were there certain characters which were used phonetically (if there are such, it would probably also be possible to discover different characters for one syllable, hence the syllable pairings)? Did they already use something like man'yō-gana as in the Manyōshū 50 years later? Or how else could they distinguish between, for example, the different verb forms of a verb, e. g. in- "to go" > ina(ba) (Irrealis), ini (Adverbial), inu (Consclusive), inuru (Attributive), inure(ba) (Realis), ine (Imperative)? How would these different forms be written and distinguished in the Chinese script used in these texts? I doubt the writers only used one Chinese character with the meaning "to go" for all of them, instead there have to be other characters (similar to today's okurigana) that indicate what conjugation the verb is in. So how would these forms be written in Old Japanese?
(I hope there actually is somebody here who studied a bit of Old Japanese... :dead
Now I won't ask why it is like that, because there are only theories on it (possibly they were pronounced differently), but my question is rather how they figured it out that most syllables have two versions. How can this distinction be recognized within the found Old Japanese texts? They're written in Classical Chinese (but presumably read in Japanese reading order [kanbun]), so how can they derive two distinct syllables from the Chinese characters? Where there like, two different hànzì which where expected to be pronounced roughly the same, so that they found that they must be two different kinds of syllables? If so, can someone maybe give me an example? How would the syllables ko1 and ko2 (or any other pairing) in Old Japanese be written?
Also, how did they even derive a transcription of the syllables if all they had were the Chinese characters in texts like Kojiki and Nihonshoki? Were there certain characters which were used phonetically (if there are such, it would probably also be possible to discover different characters for one syllable, hence the syllable pairings)? Did they already use something like man'yō-gana as in the Manyōshū 50 years later? Or how else could they distinguish between, for example, the different verb forms of a verb, e. g. in- "to go" > ina(ba) (Irrealis), ini (Adverbial), inu (Consclusive), inuru (Attributive), inure(ba) (Realis), ine (Imperative)? How would these different forms be written and distinguished in the Chinese script used in these texts? I doubt the writers only used one Chinese character with the meaning "to go" for all of them, instead there have to be other characters (similar to today's okurigana) that indicate what conjugation the verb is in. So how would these forms be written in Old Japanese?
(I hope there actually is somebody here who studied a bit of Old Japanese... :dead