changing antonyms

[Benjamin Barrett]

Shirie (sirie) is listed in Kodansha's Nihongo Daijiten, but the native
speaker (30s) I asked has never heard of it. Neither have I. It's probably
obsolete or on its way out.

Benjamin Barrett
gogaku at ix.netcom.com

-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU]On Behalf Of
Lynne Murphy

To clarify what I'm looking for, I just want a canonical antonym pair that
used to have one different member.  Y. Tagashira has a number of examples of
these for Japanese in "Survival of the Positive: History of Japanese
Antonyms"
(1992, in _The Joy of Grammar_).  For example, for 'front'-'back' there used
to be 'mae'-'sirie', but through some semantic changes the opposite of 'mae'
became 'usiro' instead (still meaning 'front'-'back').  The problem with the
Japanese examples is that Tagashira doesn't always say what happened to the
displaced word, and I'd like to be able to trace that.

Thanks for the efforts,
Lynne