Early Written Language The Japanese had no writing system prior to the introduction of the Chinese one, which was originally used by Chinese people who lived in Japan during the early Christian era.
Later, the educated Japanese used it to write the Chinese language. The earliest known examples of Japanese writing, dating back to the 5 th and 6 th Centuries A. But by the 8 th and 9 th Centuries A. The earliest known Japanese records of any length are the Kojiki A. These works are valuable in revealing the evolution of the Japanese writing system from Chinese to a specialized system for recording spoken Japanese. The Kojiki largely maintains Chinese syntax, while using character combinations specific to Japanese for their semantic content.
Because of the complex nature of kanji, using them for phonetic purposes is not very convenient. So the two kana systems developed independently during the 9 th Century, as two different methods to simplify writing. Hiragana arose as a cursive abbreviation for the kanji, and was used mostly by women, who were excluded from the study of Chinese characters. They used it mostly for poetry, diaries and novels.
Katakana was the product of priests in Buddhist temples. As a result of this Chinese influence and domestic adaptation, Japanese writing developed into the threefold system it is today, with incredible complexity.
Part of the reason for its complexity is the incongruity of the Chinese and Japanese spoken languages. Where every word in Chinese is a single syllable, Japanese is a polysyllabic language and requires open syllables. Each kanji has at least two pronunciations: one, an imitation of the equivalent Chinese word the on reading , forced into the CV phonotactics of Japanese; and the other, a native Japanese word the kun reading. The Spoken Language: Internal Diachronic Changes The ancient texts of Japan have lent to studying the diachronic sound changes in the spoken language.
The most amazing discovery about Old Japanese lies in its vowel phoneme system. I for one had accepted it as an article of faith that Japanese has always been phonetically simple, with five "pure" vowels each falling neatly into one of the five Roman letters that we foreigners use today to represent them.
Shinkichi Hashimoto discovered that characters thought to represent the same sound actually occurred in complementary distribution-- i. However, another character spirit or steam also pronounced ke , was used in entirely different contexts. Hashimoto found that these characters did not overlap in their phonetic usages.
Before proceeding, I want to share a personal observation. In my comparison of the histories of Japanese and English, I have come to the conclusion that there is a linguistic homeostatic relationship between a a change in the number of vowel phonemes, and b a new distinction between other attributes of vowels.
In other words, when a occurs, b will result to compensate. Modern Japanese a has lost three vowels since Old Japanese, but b has gained a distinction between long and short vowels that did not exist before. The development of English which used to differentiate between short and long vowels shows a similar change in the opposite direction.
In order to compensate for a the loss of vowel duration as a phonemic factor, English b has developed a new distinction between tense and lax vowels, which has given rise to new phonemes. It could be said that English and Japanese have traded places with respect to vowel length and number of vowel phonemes. After Dr. Hashimoto had shown that Old Japanese had eight vowels, Dr. This is a phonological principle that permits combinations of "harmonious" vowels in a given word, but excludes other combinations.
However, vowels from the first two groups rarely appear in the same word. Vowel harmony is common in Altaic and Uralic languages, such as Turkish and Finnish, and later I will show how it has been used to support theories relating Japanese to these groups. Spoken Language: Attempts to Classify Japanese is not conclusively linked to any other language or family of languages.
It has remained a mystery despite all these centuries of research, and continues to prod the people who speak it to seek out their identity. Since their anthropological indentity is also vague, Miller recommends keeping the people's anthropological roots out of the issue of the roots of the Japanese language.
Therefore, I have not included any evidence from that field. Despite the ambiguity of its ancestry, theories about Japanese have been whittled down over the last few centuries to two of the most prominent and promising prospects. Today, Western linguists believe it is related either to Korean, which is a geographic neighbor, or to the Ural-Altaic family, or to both. Like Japanese, Korean is an orphan, and most advocates of Japanese-Altaic also propose that Korean belongs to its Altaic friends.
Before I proceed to discuss Korean and Altaic ties, I will touch lightly on one member of the wide assortment of other theories that have tried to explain the origin of Japanese. Some have suggested that Japanese is related to the Austronesian or Malayo-Polynesian languages because of their phonotactic similarities. For example, they share all 5 common vowels, as well as the attributes of open syllables and no diphthongs Komatsu , These traits and others show a remarkable correlation between Japanese and languages of the isles of the sea, and linguistic contact probably would have been geographically possible.
Japanese language services have become extremely important in social and business settings. Unlike most western languages, Japanese has an extensive grammatical system to express politeness and formality.
Since most relationships are not equal in Japanese society, one person typically has a higher position. This position is determined by a variety of factors including job, age, experience, or even psychological state. The person in the lower position is expected to use a polite form of speech, whereas the other might use a more plain form. Strangers will also speak to each other politely. Japanese children rarely use polite speech until their teens, at which point they are expected to begin speaking in a more adult manner.
The origin of Japanese is in considerable dispute amongst linguists. Evidence has been offered for a number of sources: Ural-Altaic, Polynesian, and Chinese amonge others. Of these, Japanese is most widely believed to be connected to the Ural-Altaic family, which includes Turkish, Mongolian, Manchu, and Korean within its domain.
Korean is most frequently compared to Japanese, as both languages share significant key features such as general structure, vowel harmony, lack of conjunctions, and the extensive use of honorific speech, in which the social rank of the listener heavily affects the dialogue. Cursive Hiragana script became popular first among women, who were generally not allowed access to the same levels of education as men.
And thus Hiragana was first widely used among women in palace for the writing of personal communications and literature. This is the reason why Hiragana some times called "women's writing". For example, The Tale of Genji and other early novels by female authors used only Hiragana. Later, male authors started to use Hiragana for literature, and then used for unofficial writing such as personal letters, while Kanji was used for official documents.
In contemporary Japanese language, Hiragana is used for words without Kanji representation, for words no longer written in Kanji, and also following Kanji to show conjugational endings. Because of the way verbs and adjectives in Japanese language are conjugated, Kanji alone cannot fully convey Japanese tense and mood, as Kanji cannot be subject to variation when written without losing its meaning.
For this reason, Hiragana are suffixed to the ends of Kanji to show verb and adjective conjugations. The Birth of Second Syllabic Scripts: Katakana Katakana was developed in the 9th century during the early Heian period by Buddhist monks originated from shorthand of Kanji.
Unlike Hiragana, only men were using Katakana for official documents and documents imported from China. In contemporary Japanese, Katakana is primarily used to write foreign words, plant and animal names, and for emphasis. Fusion of Three Different Letter Systems Contemporary Japanese language is written in a mixture of three main systems: Kanji, and two syllabic scripts: Hiragana and Katakana. The Latin script is also sometimes used, mostly in acronyms and other abbreviations.
Arabic numerals are also common as the Kanji numerals for counting the numbers. Japanese Writing System in Education Japanese students begin to learn Kanji from their first year at elementary school.
A guideline created by the Japanese Ministry of Education, the list of Kyoiku Kanji "education Kanji" , specifies the 1, simple Kanji characters a child is to learn by the end of sixth grade. Children continue to study another 1, Kanji characters in junior high school, covering in total 2, Joyo Kanji "common use Kanji". Other than this Yamato Kotoba, contemporary Japanese language includes a number of words that were either borrowed from Chinese or constructed from Chinese roots.
These words are known as Kango, they blend into Japanese language from the 5th century onwards through the contact with Chinese culture. Japanese words of different origins are used in different registers in the language. Kanji is typically used comparatively for formal or academic words, while Yamato Kotoba is used more in the daily words. It is very similar to that of the English language, where Latin-derived words are used in formal or academic way, and simpler Anglo-Saxon words are used in daily conversation.
In the 16th century, Japanese words originated from Western language especially Portuguese arose, followed by words from Dutch during Japan's long isolation of the Samurai period. After the Meiji Restoration with the reopening of Japan in the 19th century, many words from German, French and English blended into Japanese.
The Japanese Invented Words became Widespread in the World In the 19th century to early 20th century, Japanese coined many neologisms to translate western ideas and concepts; these are known as Wasei Kango Japanese-made Kanji. Many of these words were then imported into Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese via their Kanji. As a result, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese share a large common corpus of vocabulary, in the same way a large number of Greek- and Latin-derived words — both inherited or borrowed into European languages, or modern coinages from Greek or Latin roots — are shared among modern European languages.
See the list of English words of Japanese origin for more.
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