I can imagine this isn’t particularly relevant to many here as it seems most people are here to learn about Modern Japan/Japanese. However, I have a specific project in mind, and I need to know for certain if I’m understanding how speakers of Old and Early Middle Japanese would have rendered Middle Chinese phonology in their own language. Is anyone here familiar with this kind of thing, or can point me to some good sources or other communities who could help? Wiktionary seems to be a bit sparse when it comes to providing etymologies that include older Japanese pronunciations.
For those that have some knowledge on this, the word that specifically made me take to Reddit is 源氏 ‘genji’. I do understand is that in Middle Chinese 氏 would have been pronounced something like ‘dzye’, and that this would have been borrowed into Japanese as either ‘si’ or ‘zi’. Now, I would assumed this would make the word 源氏 be pronounced ‘gensi’ or ‘genzi’. This is the part I’m a struggling a bit with, as if you move forward in time a bit ‘si’ would be pronounced ‘shi’, and I think ‘zi’ would now be ‘ji’.
As I’m typing I actually remembered about rendaku. Maybe the pronunciation ‘genji’ a result of rendaku from an earlier ‘gensi/genshi’? As if you take the 氏 by itself, it is pronounced ‘shi’