changing antonyms

[Lynne Murphy]

Benjamin Barrett said:
> 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.

It's no wonder--this is a change that happened around the 13th century.

Lynne


> 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
>