70-526: In the Japanese language, the gojūon ( 五十音 , Japanese pronunciation: [ɡo(d)ʑɯꜜːoɴ] , lit. "fifty sounds") is a traditional system ordering kana characters by their component phonemes , roughly analogous to alphabetical order . The "fifty" ( gojū ) in its name refers to the 5×10 grid in which the characters are displayed. Each kana, which may be a hiragana or katakana character, corresponds to one sound in Japanese. As depicted at
140-589: A glossing system to add readings or explanations to Buddhist sutras . Both of these systems were simplified to make writing easier. The shapes of many hiragana resembled the Chinese cursive script , as did those of many katakana the Korean gugyeol , suggesting that the Japanese followed the continental pattern of their neighbors. Kana is traditionally said to have been invented by the Buddhist priest Kūkai in
210-529: A . Many scholars, following Shinkichi Hashimoto , argue that p had already lenited to [ɸ] by the Old Japanese period, but Miyake argues that it was still a stop. The Chinese characters chosen to write syllables with the Old Japanese vowel a suggest that it was an open unrounded vowel /a/ . The vowel u was a close back rounded vowel /u/ , unlike the unrounded /ɯ/ of Modern Standard Japanese. Several hypotheses have been advanced to explain
280-504: A CVV syllable with complex nucleus (i.e. multiple or expressively long vowels), or a CCV syllable with complex onset (i.e. including a glide , C y V, C w V). The limited number of phonemes in Japanese, as well as the relatively rigid syllable structure, makes the kana system a very accurate representation of spoken Japanese . 'Kana' is a compound of kari ( 仮 , 'borrowed; assumed; false') and na ( 名 , 'name') , which eventually collapsed into kanna and ultimately 'kana'. Today it
350-457: A column in the gojūon , while the number of presses determines the row. For example, the '2' button corresponds to the ka -column ( ka , ki , ku , ke , ko ), and the button is pressed repeatedly to get the intended kana. In each entry, the top entry is the hiragana, the second entry is the corresponding katakana, the third entry is the Hepburn romanization of the kana, and the fourth entry
420-408: A compound was lexicalized as a single morpheme. The following fusions occurred: Adjacent vowels belonging to different morphemes, or pairs of vowels for which none of the above fusions applied, were reduced by deleting one or other of the vowels. Most often, the first of the adjacent vowels was deleted: The exception to this rule occurred when the first of the adjacent vowels was the sole vowel of
490-407: A few phonemic differences from later forms, such as a simpler syllable structure and distinctions between several pairs of syllables that have been pronounced identically since Early Middle Japanese. The phonetic realization of these distinctions is uncertain. Internal reconstruction points to a pre-Old Japanese phase with fewer consonants and vowels. As is typical of Japonic languages, Old Japanese
560-407: A limited set of characters, such as Wabun code for Morse code telegrams and single-byte digital character encodings such as JIS X 0201 or EBCDIK , likewise dispense with kanji, instead using only katakana. This is not necessary in systems supporting double-byte or variable-width encodings such as Shift JIS , EUC-JP , UTF-8 or UTF-16 . Old Japanese was written entirely in kanji, and
630-438: A meaning . Apart from the five vowels, it is always CV (consonant onset with vowel nucleus ), such as ka , ki , sa , shi , etc., with the sole exception of the C grapheme for nasal codas usually romanised as n . The structure has led some scholars to label the system moraic , instead of syllabic , because it requires the combination of two syllabograms to represent a CVC syllable with coda (e.g. CV n , CV m , CV ng ),
700-429: A monosyllabic morpheme (usually a clitic ), in which case the other vowel was deleted: Cases where both outcomes are found are attributed to different analyses of morpheme boundaries: Internal reconstruction suggests that the stage preceding Old Japanese had fewer consonants and vowels. Internal reconstruction suggests that the Old Japanese voiced obstruents, which always occurred in medial position, arose from
770-455: A poem which uses each kana once. However, hiragana and katakana did not quickly supplant man'yōgana . It was only in 1900 that the present set of kana was codified. All the other forms of hiragana and katakana developed before the 1900 codification are known as hentaigana ( 変体仮名 , "variant kana") . Rules for their usage as per the spelling reforms of 1946, the gendai kana-zukai ( 現代仮名遣い , "present-day kana usage") , which abolished
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#1732787293106840-413: A poetry anthology assembled sometime after 759 and the eponym of man'yōgana , exemplifies this phenomenon, where as many as almost twenty kanji were used for the mora ka . The consistency of the kana used was thus dependent on the style of the writer. Hiragana developed as a distinct script from cursive man'yōgana , whereas katakana developed from abbreviated parts of regular script man'yōgana as
910-453: A set of kanji called man'yōgana were first used to represent the phonetic values of grammatical particles and morphemes. As there was no consistent method of sound representation, a phoneme could be represented by multiple kanji, and even those kana's pronunciations differed in whether they were to be read as kungana ( 訓仮名 , "meaning kana") or ongana ( 音仮名 , "sound kana") , making decipherment problematic. The man'yōshū ,
980-451: A single morpheme. Arisaka's Law states that -o 2 was generally not found in the same morpheme as -a , -o 1 or -u . Some scholars have interpreted that as a vestige of earlier vowel harmony , but it is very different from patterns that are observed in, for example, the Turkic languages . Two adjacent vowels fused to form a new vowel when a consonant was lost within a morpheme, or
1050-560: A tool for children), there can be no word-by-word collation; all collation is kana-by-kana. The hiragana range in Unicode is U+3040 ... U+309F, and the katakana range is U+30A0 ... U+30FF. The obsolete and rare characters ( wi and we ) also have their proper code points. Characters U+3095 and U+3096 are hiragana small ka and small ke , respectively. U+30F5 and U+30F6 are their katakana equivalents. Characters U+3099 and U+309A are combining dakuten and handakuten , which correspond to
1120-464: Is a danger of circular reasoning . Additional evidence has been drawn from phonological typology , subsequent developments in the Japanese pronunciation, and the comparative study of the Ryukyuan languages . Miyake reconstructed the following consonant inventory: The voiceless obstruents /p, t, s, k/ had voiced prenasalized counterparts /ᵐb, ⁿd, ⁿz, ᵑɡ/ . Prenasalization was still present in
1190-533: Is a ligature of koto ( コト ), also found in vertical writing. Additionally, there are halfwidth equivalents to the standard fullwidth katakana. These are encoded within the Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms block (U+FF00–U+FFEF), starting at U+FF65 and ending at U+FF9F (characters U+FF61–U+FF64 are halfwidth punctuation marks): There is also a small "Katakana Phonetic Extensions" range (U+31F0 ... U+31FF), which includes some additional small kana characters for writing
1260-604: Is also used to represent onomatopoeia and interjections, emphasis, technical and scientific terms, transcriptions of the Sino-Japanese readings of kanji, and some corporate branding. Kana can be written in small form above or next to lesser-known kanji in order to show pronunciation; this is called furigana . Furigana is used most widely in children's or learners' books. Literature for young children who do not yet know kanji may dispense with it altogether and instead use hiragana combined with spaces. Systems supporting only
1330-465: Is at the end) and the diacritics do not follow the usual pattern: p/b (as in Sanskrit) is the usual unvoiced/voiced pattern, and [h] has different articulation. This is because /h/ was previously [p] , and pronouncing /h/ as [h] is recent. (More detail at Old Japanese: Consonants ; in brief: prior to Old Japanese, modern /h/ was presumably [p] , as in Ryukyuan languages . Proto-Japanese
1400-572: Is believed to have split into Old Japanese and the Ryukyuan languages in the Yamato period (250–710). In Old Japanese (from 9th century) and on to the 17th century, /h/ was pronounced [ɸ] . The earliest evidence was from 842, by the monk Ennin , writing in the Zaitōki that Sanskrit /p/ is more labial than Japanese. The Portuguese later transcribed the は-row as fa/fi/fu/fe/fo .) Moraic n ( ん )
1470-527: Is general agreement that word-initial p had become a voiceless bilabial fricative [ɸ] by Early Modern Japanese , as suggested by its transcription as f in later Portuguese works and as ph or hw in the Korean textbook Ch'ŏphae Sinŏ . In Modern Standard Japanese, it is romanized as h and has different allophones before various vowels. In medial position, it became [w] in Early Middle Japanese and has since disappeared except before
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#17327872931061540-426: Is generally assumed that 'kana' were considered "false" kanji due to their purely phonetic nature, as opposed to mana ( 真名 ) which were "true" kanji used for their meanings. Yet originally, mana and kana were purely calligraphic terms with mana referring to Chinese characters written in the regular script ( kaisho ) and kana referring to those written in the cursive ( sōsho ) style (see hiragana ). It
1610-480: Is stylistic. Usually, hiragana is the default syllabary, and katakana is used in certain special cases. Hiragana is used to write native Japanese words with no kanji representation (or whose kanji is thought obscure or difficult), as well as grammatical elements such as particles and inflections ( okurigana ). Today katakana is most commonly used to write words of foreign origin that do not have kanji representations, as well as foreign personal and place names. Katakana
1680-668: Is the oldest attested stage of the Japanese language , recorded in documents from the Nara period (8th century). It became Early Middle Japanese in the succeeding Heian period , but the precise delimitation of the stages is controversial. Old Japanese was an early member of the Japonic language family. No genetic links to other language families have been proven. Old Japanese was written using man'yōgana , using Chinese characters as syllabograms or (occasionally) logograms . It featured
1750-675: Is the prevalent system for collating Japanese in Japan. For example, dictionaries are ordered using this method. Other systems used are the iroha ordering, and, for kanji, the radical ordering. The gojūon arrangement is thought to have been influenced by both the Siddham script used for writing Sanskrit and the Chinese fanqie system. The monk Kūkai introduced the Siddhaṃ script to Japan in 806 on his return from China. Belonging to
1820-624: Is the pronunciation written in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Please see Japanese phonology for more details on the individual sounds. The rows are referred to as dan ( 段 ) , and the columns as gyō ( 行 ) . They are named for their first entry, thus the rows are (top to bottom) あ段、い段、う段、え段、お段 while the columns are (right to left) あ行、か行、さ行、た行、な行、は行、ま行、や行、ら行、わ行 . These are sometimes written in katakana, such as ア行 , and conspicuously used when referring to Japanese verb conjugation – for example,
1890-409: Is very little Japonic evidence for them. As seen in § Morphophonemics , many occurrences of the rare vowels i 2 , e 1 , e 2 and o 1 arise from fusion of more common vowels. Similarly, many nouns having independent forms ending in -i 2 or -e 2 also have bound forms ending in a different vowel, which are believed to be older. For example, sake 2 'rice wine' has
1960-555: The Fudoki (720) and the 21 poems of the Bussokuseki-kahi ( c. 752 ). The latter has the virtue of being an original inscription, whereas the oldest surviving manuscripts of all the other texts are the results of centuries of copying, with the attendant risk of scribal errors. Prose texts are more limited but are thought to reflect the syntax of Old Japanese more accurately than verse texts do. The most important are
2030-716: The Ainu language . Further small kana characters are present in the "Small Kana Extension" block. Unicode also includes "Katakana letter archaic E" (U+1B000), as well as 255 archaic Hiragana , in the Kana Supplement block. It also includes a further 31 archaic Hiragana in the Kana Extended-A block. The Kana Extended-B block was added in September, 2021 with the release of version 14.0: Old Japanese#Consonants Old Japanese ( 上代日本語 , Jōdai Nihon-go )
2100-585: The Brahmic family of scripts , the Sanskrit ordering of letters was used for it. Buddhist monks who invented katakana chose to use the word order of Sanskrit and Siddham , since important Buddhist writings were written with those alphabets. In an unusual set of events, although it uses Sanskrit organization (grid, with order of consonants and vowels), it also uses the Chinese order of writing (in columns, right-to-left). The order of consonants and vowels, and
2170-611: The Nihon Shoki , the Chinese characters appeared to have been chosen to represent a pitch pattern similar to that recorded in the Ruiju Myōgishō , a dictionary that was compiled in the late 11th century. In that section, a low-pitch syllable was represented by a character with the Middle Chinese level tone, and a high pitch was represented by a character with one of the other three Middle Chinese tones . (A similar division
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2240-481: The Suiko period (592–628). Those fragments are usually considered a form of Old Japanese. Of the 10,000 paper records kept at Shōsōin , only two, dating from about 762, are in Old Japanese. Over 150,000 wooden tablets ( mokkan ) dating from the late 7th and early 8th century have been unearthed. The tablets bear short texts, often in Old Japanese of a more colloquial style than the polished poems and liturgies of
2310-450: The gojūon , smaller versions of kana are treated in the same way as full-size versions: Voiced versions (those with a dakuten ) are classified under their unvoiced versions; If the words are otherwise identical, the voiced version is placed after the unvoiced; handakuten are placed after dakuten. For example, and To remember the gojūon , various mnemonics have been devised. For example, The first letters in such phrases give
2380-660: The 27 Norito ('liturgies') recorded in the Engishiki (compiled in 927) and the 62 Senmyō (literally 'announced order', meaning imperial edicts) recorded in the Shoku Nihongi (797). A limited number of Japanese words, mostly personal names and place names, are recorded phonetically in ancient Chinese texts, such as the " Wei Zhi " portion of the Records of the Three Kingdoms (3rd century AD), but
2450-573: The 6th century. Southern Ryukyuan varieties such as Miyako , Yaeyama and Yonaguni have /b/ corresponding to Old Japanese w , but only Yonaguni (at the far end of the chain) has /d/ where Old Japanese has y : However, many linguists, especially in Japan, argue that the Southern Ryukyuan voiced stops are local innovations, adducing a variety of reasons. Some supporters of *b and *d also add *z and *g, which both disappeared in Old Japanese, for reasons of symmetry. However, there
2520-692: The A/B distinctions made in man'yōgana . The issue is hotly debated, and there is no consensus. The traditional view, first advanced by Kyōsuke Kindaichi in 1938, is that there were eight pure vowels, with the type B vowels being more central than their type A counterparts. Others, beginning in the 1930s but more commonly since the work of Roland Lange in 1968, have attributed the type A/B distinction to medial or final glides /j/ and /w/ . The diphthong proposals are often connected to hypotheses about pre-Old Japanese, but all exhibit an uneven distribution of glides. The distinction between mo 1 and mo 2
2590-451: The Korean peninsula. For example, Several different notations for the type A/B distinction are found in the literature, including: There is no consensus on the pronunciation of the syllables distinguished by man'yōgana . One difficulty is that the Middle Chinese pronunciations of the characters used are also disputed, and since the reconstruction of their phonetic values is partly based on later Sino-Japanese pronunciations, there
2660-575: The adnominal form of the verb uwe 'to plant'. Alexander Vovin argues that the non-initial syllables i and u in these cases should be read as Old Japanese syllables yi and wu . The rare vowel i 2 almost always occurred at the end of a morpheme. Most occurrences of e 1 , e 2 and o 1 were also at the end of a morpheme. The mokkan typically did not distinguish voiced from voiceless consonants, and wrote some syllables with characters that had fewer strokes and were based on older Chinese pronunciations imported via
2730-418: The alternative iroha ordering is from the 1079 text Konkōmyō Saishōōkyō Ongi ( 金光明最勝王経音義 ) . Gojūon ordering was first used for a dictionary in the 1484 Onkochishinsho ( 温故知新書 ) ; following this use, gojūon and iroha were both used for a time, but today gojūon is more prevalent. Today the gojūon system forms the basis of input methods for Japanese mobile phones – each key corresponds to
2800-605: The bound form and a suffix *-i. The origin of this suffix is debated, with one proposal being the ancestor of the obsolescent particle i (whose function is also uncertain), and another being a weakened consonant (suggested by proposed Korean cognates). There are also alternations suggesting e 2 < *əi, such as se 2 / so 2 - 'back' and me 2 / mo 2 - 'bud'. Some authors believe that they belong to an earlier layer than i 2 < *əi, but others reconstruct two central vowels *ə and *ɨ, which merged everywhere except before *i. Other authors attribute
2870-459: The corresponding unvoiced columns ( k , s , t and h ) and the voicing mark, dakuten . Syllables beginning with [p] are spelled with kana from the h column and the half-voicing mark, handakuten . Syllables beginning with palatalized consonants are spelled with one of the seven consonantal kana from the i row followed by small ya , yu or yo . These digraphs are called yōon . The difference in usage between hiragana and katakana
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2940-408: The form saka- in compounds such as sakaduki 'sake cup'. The following alternations are the most common: The widely accepted analysis of this situation is that the most common Old Japanese vowels a , u , i 1 and o 2 reflect earlier *a, *u, *i and *ə respectively, and the other vowels reflect fusions of these vowels: Thus the above independent forms of nouns can be derived from
3010-597: The grid at the end: with 5 gaps and 1 extra character, the current number of distinct kana in a moraic chart in modern Japanese is therefore 46. Some of these gaps have always existed as gaps in sound: there was no yi or wu even in Old Japanese , with the kana for i and u doubling up for those phantom values. Ye persisted long enough for kana to be developed for it, but disappeared in Early Middle Japanese , having merged with e . Much later, with
3080-485: The grid does not exactly accord with Sanskrit ordering of Modern Japanese; that is because the grid is based on Old Japanese , and some sounds have changed in the interim. What is now s / さ was previously pronounced either [ts] or [s] , hence its location corresponding to Sanskrit /t͡ʃ/ ; in Sanskrit /s/ appears towards the end of the list. Kana starting with h (e.g. は ), b (e.g. ば ) and p (e.g. ぱ ) are placed where p/b are in Sanskrit (in Sanskrit, h
3150-458: The grid layout, originates in Sanskrit shiksha ( śikṣā , Hindu phonetics and phonology), and Brāhmī script , as reflected throughout the Brahmic family of scripts . Specifically, the consonants are ordered from the back to the front of the mouth ( velar to labial ). The Sanskrit was written left-to-right, with vowels changing in rows, not columns; writing the grid vertically follows Chinese writing convention . There are three ways in which
3220-492: The influence of Japanese grammar , such as the word order (for example, the verb being placed after the object). Chinese and Koreans had long used Chinese characters to write non-Chinese terms and proper names phonetically by selecting characters for Chinese words that sounded similar to each syllable. Koreans also used the characters phonetically to write Korean particles and inflections that were added to Chinese texts to allow them to be read as Korean ( Idu script ). In Japan,
3290-492: The kana for wi (ゐ・ヰ), we (ゑ・ヱ), and wo (を・ヲ) (except that the last was reserved as the accusative particle). Kana are the basis for collation in Japanese. They are taken in the order given by the gojūon (あ い う え お ... わ を ん), though iroha (い ろ は に ほ へ と ... せ す (ん)) ordering is used for enumeration in some circumstances. Dictionaries differ in the sequence order for long/short vowel distinction, small tsu and diacritics. As Japanese does not use word spaces (except as
3360-577: The language of the Nara period (710–794), when the capital was Heijō-kyō (now Nara ). That is the period of the earliest connected texts in Japanese, the 112 songs included in the Kojiki (712). The other major literary sources of the period are the 128 songs included in the Nihon Shoki (720) and the Man'yōshū ( c. 759 ), a compilation of over 4,500 poems. Shorter samples are 25 poems in
3430-456: The late 17th century (according to the Korean textbook Ch'ŏphae Sinŏ ) and is found in some Modern Japanese and Ryukyuan dialects, but it has disappeared in modern Japanese except for the intervocalic nasal stop allophone [ŋ] of /ɡ/ . The sibilants /s/ and /ⁿz/ may have been palatalized before e and i . Comparative evidence from Ryukyuan languages suggests that Old Japanese p reflected an earlier voiceless bilabial stop *p. There
3500-428: The ninth century. Kūkai certainly brought the Siddhaṃ script of India home on his return from China in 806; his interest in the sacred aspects of speech and writing led him to the conclusion that Japanese would be better represented by a phonetic alphabet than by the kanji which had been used up to that point. The modern arrangement of kana reflects that of Siddhaṃ, but the traditional iroha arrangement follows
3570-643: The now-standard hiragana. Katakana, with a few additions, are also used to write Ainu . A number of systems exist to write the Ryūkyūan languages , in particular Okinawan , in hiragana. Taiwanese kana were used in Taiwanese Hokkien as ruby text for Chinese characters in Taiwan when it was under Japanese rule . Each kana character corresponds to one sound or whole syllable in the Japanese language, unlike kanji regular script , which corresponds to
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#17327872931063640-759: The ordering of the non-voiced initial sounds. For vowel ordering, the vowel sounds in the following English phrase may be used as a mnemonic: The vowel sounds in the English words approximate the Japanese vowels: a, i, u, e, o. Kana Kana ( 仮名 , Japanese pronunciation: [kana] ) are syllabaries used to write Japanese phonological units, morae . In current usage, kana most commonly refers to hiragana and katakana . It can also refer to their ancestor magana ( 真仮名 , lit. 'true kana') , which were Chinese characters used phonetically to transcribe Japanese (e.g. man'yōgana ); and hentaigana , which are historical variants of
3710-544: The practice was developed into man'yōgana , a complete script for the language that used Chinese characters phonetically, which was the ancestor of modern kana syllabaries. This system was already in use in the verse parts of the Kojiki (712) and the Nihon Shoki (720). For example, the first line of the first poem in the Kojiki was written with five characters: This method of writing Japanese syllables by using characters for their Chinese sounds ( ongana )
3780-545: The primary corpus. Artifacts inscribed with Chinese characters dated as early as the 1st century AD have been found in Japan, but detailed knowledge of the script seems not to have reached the islands until the early 5th century. According to the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki , the script was brought by scholars from Baekje (southwestern Korea). The earliest texts found in Japan were written in Classical Chinese , probably by immigrant scribes. Later "hybrid" texts show
3850-428: The right using hiragana characters, the sequence begins with あ ( a ), い ( i ), う ( u ), え ( e ), お ( o ), then continues with か ( ka ), き ( ki ), く ( ku ), け ( ke ), こ ( ko ), and so on and so forth for a total of ten rows of five columns. Although nominally containing 50 characters, the grid is not completely filled, and, further, there is an extra character added outside
3920-411: The spacing characters U+309B and U+309C. U+309D is the hiragana iteration mark , used to repeat a previous hiragana. U+309E is the voiced hiragana iteration mark, which stands in for the previous hiragana but with the consonant voiced ( k becomes g , h becomes b , etc.). U+30FD and U+30FE are the katakana iteration marks. U+309F is a ligature of yori ( より ) sometimes used in vertical writing. U+30FF
3990-414: The spelling reforms after World War II , the kana for wi and we were replaced with i and e , the sounds they had merged with. The kana for moraic n (hiragana ん ) is not part of the grid, as it was introduced long after the gojūon ordering was devised. (Previously mu (hiragana む ) was used for this sound.) The gojūon contains all the basic kana, but it does not include: The gojūon order
4060-580: The syllable count to 87. Some authors also believe that two forms of po were distinguished in the Kojiki . All of these pairs had merged in the Early Middle Japanese of the Heian period. The consonants g , z , d , b and r did not occur at the start of a word. Conversely, syllables consisting of a single vowel were restricted to word-initial position, with a few exceptions such as kai 'oar', ko 2 i 'to lie down', kui 'to regret' (with conclusive kuyu ), oi 'to age' and uuru ,
4130-436: The system has gaps where yi and wu might be expected. Shinkichi Hashimoto discovered in 1917 that many syllables that have a modern i , e or o occurred in two forms, termed types A ( 甲 , kō ) and B ( 乙 , otsu ) . These are denoted by subscripts 1 and 2 respectively in the above table. The syllables mo 1 and mo 2 are not distinguished in the slightly later Nihon Shoki and Man'yōshū , reducing
4200-454: The term 'kana' is now commonly understood as hiragana and katakana, it actually has broader application as listed below: The following table reads, in gojūon order, as a , i , u , e , o (down first column), then ka , ki , ku , ke , ko (down second column), and so on. n appears on its own at the end. Asterisks mark unused combinations. Syllables beginning with the voiced consonants [g], [z], [d] and [b] are spelled with kana from
4270-656: The transcriptions by Chinese scholars are unreliable. The oldest surviving inscriptions from Japan, dating from the 5th or early 6th centuries, include those on the Suda Hachiman Shrine Mirror , the Inariyama Sword , and the Eta Funayama Sword . Those inscriptions are written in Classical Chinese but contain several Japanese names that were transcribed phonetically using Chinese characters. Such inscriptions became more common from
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#17327872931064340-693: The variation to different reflexes in different dialects and note that *əi yields e in Ryukyuan languages. Some instances of word-final e 1 and o 1 are difficult to analyse as fusions, and some authors postulate *e and *o to account for such cases. A few alternations, as well as comparisons with Eastern Old Japanese and Ryukyuan languages, suggest that *e and *o also occurred in non-word-final positions at an earlier stage but were raised in such positions to i 1 and u , respectively, in central Old Japanese. The mid vowels are also found in some early mokkan and in some modern Japanese dialects. As in later forms of Japanese, Old Japanese word order
4410-407: The verb yomu ( 読む , "read") is of ma-gyō go-dan katsuyō ( マ行 五段活用 , " ma -column 5-class conjugation") type. Meiji writers, including grammarians and phonologists, often grouped kana into classes. The word they used was 音 ( on , literally "sound"), but their descriptions were based largely on Japanese orthography and the organization of the gojūon table: In the ordering based on
4480-416: The weakening of earlier nasal syllables before voiceless obstruents: In some cases, such as tubu 'grain', kadi 'rudder' and pi 1 za 'knee', there is no evidence for a preceding vowel, which leads some scholars to posit final nasals at the earlier stage. Some linguists suggest that Old Japanese w and y derive, respectively, from *b and *d at some point before the oldest inscriptions in
4550-415: Was not present in Old Japanese (it developed following Chinese borrowings), does not fit with other characters due to having no vowel, and thus is attached at the end of the grid, as in Sanskrit treatment of miscellaneous characters. The earliest example of a gojūon -style layout dates from a manuscript known as Kujakukyō Ongi ( 孔雀経音義 ) dated c. 1004 –1028. In contrast, the earliest example of
4620-429: Was not until the 18th century that the early-nationalist kokugaku movement which wanted to move away from Sinocentric academia began to reanalyze the script from a phonological point of view. In the following centuries, contrary to the traditional Sinocentric view, kana began to be considered a national Japanese writing system that was distinct from Chinese characters, which is the dominant view today. Although
4690-416: Was primarily an agglutinative language with a subject–object–verb word order, adjectives and adverbs preceding the nouns and verbs they modified and auxiliary verbs and particles appended to the main verb. Unlike in later periods, Old Japanese adjectives could be used uninflected to modify following nouns. Old Japanese verbs had a rich system of tense and aspect suffixes. Old Japanese is usually defined as
4760-491: Was seen only in Kojiki and vanished afterwards. The distribution of syllables suggests that there may have once been * po 1 , * po 2 , * bo 1 and * bo 2 . If that was true, a distinction was made between Co 1 and Co 2 for all consonants C except for w . Some take that as evidence that Co 1 may have represented Cwo . Although modern Japanese dialects have pitch accent systems, they were usually not shown in man'yōgana . However, in one part of
4830-426: Was supplemented with indirect methods in the complex mixed script of the Man'yōshū ( c. 759 ). In man'yōgana , each Old Japanese syllable was represented by a Chinese character. Although any of several characters could be used for a given syllable, a careful analysis reveals that 88 syllables were distinguished in early Old Japanese, typified by the Kojiki songs: As in later forms of Japanese,
4900-419: Was used in the tone patterns of Chinese poetry, which were emulated by Japanese poets in the late Asuka period .) Thus, it appears that the Old Japanese accent system was similar to that of Early Middle Japanese. Old Japanese words consisted of one or more open syllables of the form (C)V, subject to additional restrictions: In 1934, Arisaka Hideyo proposed a set of phonological restrictions permitted in
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