Is "琉語解釋" Japanese?


Today I bought a hundred year old book in a secondhand bookshop in Naha,
Okinawa. It's a handbook of the Ryukyuan language in Japanese, though it has
both Japanese and English titles there is no English inside.

This is how it describes itself in English

> Being a Guide to Conversations in the Standard  
>  Luchuan, to which is added 琉語解釋 written  
>  by [Giwan Chōho](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giwan_Ch%C5%8Dho) the last
> Statesman  
>  of old Luchu,
>
> 1916

The Japanese I've shown it to could not guess what 琉語解釋 means. The first two
characters are obviously an abbreviated way to say "Ryukyuan language" (琉球語
would be unabbreviated) but the last two characters baffled them.

Since this book is from the prewar era it must use 旧字体, older kanji forms
before the simplified characters were introduced and many other characters
were more or less deprecated in the language reforms / standardization.

But another strange thing is that the book does not use the usual English
terms "Ryukyu" and "Ryukyuan" but very Chinese-looking terms "Luchu" and
"Luchuan".

This makes me wonder if this particular phrase might actually be Chinese
rather than Japanese?




**釋:** The English wiktionary may be incorrect or incomplete. I suggest you
cross-reference with a kanji dictionary. Here is a screenshot from my
electronic dictionary (新漢語林):![釋 as a version of
釈](https://i.stack.imgur.com/HtQsE.jpg)

As you can see, 釋 is marked as a 旧字(体) of 釈. You may also try the glyphwiki:
[釋 on glyphwiki](http://glyphwiki.org/wiki/u91cb). The google android IME
tells you this as well when converting _しゃく_.

**Luchuan:** Here is an instance of this word in an English book. [An
historical grammar of Japanese, p.143,
Luchuan](https://archive.org/stream/historicalgramma00sansuoft#page/142/mode/2up)

> It is perhaps significant that the Luchuan conjugation does not include a
> perfect form.




**釋:** The English wiktionary may be incorrect or incomplete. I suggest you
cross-reference with a kanji dictionary. Here is a screenshot from my
electronic dictionary (新漢語林):![釋 as a version of
釈](https://i.stack.imgur.com/HtQsE.jpg)

As you can see, 釋 is marked as a 旧字(体) of 釈. You may also try the glyphwiki:
[釋 on glyphwiki](http://glyphwiki.org/wiki/u91cb). The google android IME
tells you this as well when converting _しゃく_.

**Luchuan:** Here is an instance of this word in an English book. [An
historical grammar of Japanese, p.143,
Luchuan](https://archive.org/stream/historicalgramma00sansuoft#page/142/mode/2up)

> It is perhaps significant that the Luchuan conjugation does not include a
> perfect form.

