The Verb toru in Old Japanese.

This paper looks at the established theory that the verb toru in Old Japanese exhibits anomalous spelling. A careful examination of poems in Kojiki (Kurano (1958)), Nihon shoki (Ienaga et al. (1967)), and Man'yôshû (Gomi et al. (1957)) shows that there originally were two different verbs which later merged into one, toru. These two verbs had different meanings. Twor- meant 'hold support', but tor- meant 'take, pick up, capture'. Another important distinction between these verbs was aspect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]