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69-561: The existence and meaning of this system is a critical point of scholarly debate in the study of the history of the Japanese language. The following are the syllabic distinctions made in Old Japanese . Those syllables marked in gray are known as jōdai tokushu kanazukai . The two groups merged by the 9th century. It predates the development of kana , and the phonetic difference is unclear. Therefore, an ad hoc transcription system

138-529: 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

207-668: A Korean form, and the other is also found in Ryukyuan and Eastern Old Japanese, suggesting that the former is an early loan from Korean. He suggests that to eliminate such early loans, Old Japanese morphemes should not be assigned a Japonic origin unless they are also attested in Southern Ryukyuan or Eastern Old Japanese. That procedure leaves fewer than a dozen possible cognates, which may have been borrowed by Korean from Peninsular Japonic. Most Japonic languages have voicing opposition for obstruents , with exceptions such as

276-531: A Southwestern branch. Kyushu and Ryukyuan varieties also share some lexical items, some of which appear to be innovations. The internal classification by Elisabeth de Boer includes Ryukyuan as a deep subbranch of a Kyūshū–Ryūkyū branch: She also proposes a branch consisting of the Izumo dialect (spoken on the northern coast of western Honshu) and the Tōhoku dialects (northern Honshu), which show similar developments in

345-513: A basic subject–object–verb word order, modifiers before nouns, and postpositions . There is a clear distinction between verbs, which have extensive inflectional morphology, and nominals, with agglutinative suffixing morphology. Ryukyuan languages inflect all adjectives in the same way as verbs, while mainland varieties have classes of adjectives that inflect as nouns and verbs respectively. Most Japonic languages mark singular and plural number , but some Northern Ryukyuan languages also have

414-403: A combination of internal reconstruction from Old Japanese and by applying the comparative method to Old Japanese (including eastern dialects) and Ryukyuan. The major reconstructions of the 20th century were produced by Samuel Elmo Martin and Shirō Hattori . Proto-Japonic words are generally polysyllabic, with syllables having the form (C)V. The following proto-Japonic consonant inventory

483-408: 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

552-407: 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

621-429: 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

690-434: A simple (C)V syllable structure and avoiding vowel sequences. The script also distinguished eight vowels (or diphthongs), with two each corresponding to modern i , e and o . Most of the texts reflect the speech of the area around Nara , the eighth-century Japanese capital, but over 300 poems were written in eastern dialects of Old Japanese . The language experienced a massive influx of Sino-Japanese vocabulary after

759-451: 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

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828-503: A small population of elderly speakers. The Ryukyuan languages were originally and traditionally spoken throughout the Ryukyu Islands , an island arc stretching between the southern Japanese island of Kyushu and the island of Taiwan . Most of them are considered "definitely" or "critically endangered" because of the spread of mainland Japanese. Since Old Japanese displayed several innovations that are not shared with Ryukyuan,

897-459: Is a language family comprising Japanese , spoken in the main islands of Japan, and the Ryukyuan languages , spoken in the Ryukyu Islands . The family is universally accepted by linguists , and significant progress has been made in reconstructing the proto-language , Proto-Japonic . The reconstruction implies a split between all dialects of Japanese and all Ryukyuan varieties, probably before

966-409: 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

1035-418: Is based on a subsyllabic unit, the mora . Each syllable has a basic mora of the form (C)V but a nasal coda , geminate consonant , or lengthened vowel counts as an additional mora. However, some dialects in northern Honshu or southern Kyushu have syllable-based rhythm. Like Ainu, Middle Korean , and some modern Korean dialects , most Japonic varieties have a lexical pitch accent , which governs whether

1104-729: Is employed. Syllables written with subscript 1 are known as type A ( 甲 , kō ) and those with subscript 2 as type B ( 乙 , otsu ) (these are the first two celestial stems , and are used for such numbering in Japanese). There are several competing transcription systems. One popular system places a diaeresis above the vowel: ï, ë, ö. This typically represents i 2 , e 2 , and o 2 , and assumes that unmarked i, e, and o are i 1 , e 1 , and o 1 . It does not necessarily have anything to do with pronunciation. There are several problems with this system. Another system uses superscripts instead of subscripts. The "Yale System" writes

1173-533: Is fragmentary evidence suggesting that now-extinct Japonic languages were spoken in the central and southern parts of the Korean peninsula. Vovin calls these languages Peninsular Japonic and groups Japanese and Ryukyuan as Insular Japonic  [ fr ] . The most-cited evidence comes from chapter 37 of the Samguk sagi (compiled in 1145), which contains a list of pronunciations and meanings of placenames in

1242-527: 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

1311-611: Is generally agreed upon, except that some scholars argue for voiced stops *b and *d instead of glides *w and *j : The Old Japanese voiced consonants b , d , z and g , which never occurred word-initially, are derived from clusters of nasals and voiceless consonants after the loss of an intervening vowel. Most authors accept six Proto-Japonic vowels: Some authors also propose a high central vowel *ɨ . The mid vowels *e and *o were raised to Old Japanese i and u respectively, except word-finally. Other Old Japanese vowels arose from sequences of Proto-Japonic vowels. It

1380-625: Is only made in the oldest text: Kojiki . After that, they merged into /mo/. In later texts, confusion between types A and B can be seen. Nearly all of the A/B distinctions had vanished by the Classical Japanese period. As seen in early Heian Period texts such as Kogo Shūi , the final syllables to be distinguished were /ko 1 , go 1 / and /ko 2 , go 2 /. After the merger, CV 1 and CV 2 became CV. Old Japanese language Old Japanese ( 上代日本語 , Jōdai Nihon-go )

1449-668: 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

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1518-409: 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

1587-555: 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

1656-530: The Korean peninsula around 700 to 300 BC by wet-rice farmers of the Yayoi culture and spread throughout the Japanese archipelago , replacing indigenous languages. The former wider distribution of Ainu languages is confirmed by placenames in northern Honshu ending in -betsu (from Ainu pet 'river') and -nai (from Ainu nai 'stream'). Somewhat later, Japonic languages also spread southward to

1725-666: 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

1794-463: The Ryukyu Islands . There is fragmentary placename evidence that now-extinct Japonic languages were still spoken in central and southern parts of the Korean peninsula several centuries later. Japanese is the de facto national language of Japan , where it is spoken by about 126 million people. The oldest attestation is Old Japanese , which was recorded using Chinese characters in the 7th and 8th centuries. It differed from Modern Japanese in having

1863-481: 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

1932-414: The dual . Most Ryukyuan languages mark a clusivity distinction in plural (or dual) first-person pronouns, but no Mainland varieties do so. The most common type of morphosyntactic alignment is nominative–accusative , but neutral (or direct), active–stative and (very rarely) tripartite alignment are found in some Japonic languages. The proto-language of the family has been reconstructed by using

2001-660: 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

2070-557: 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

2139-484: The 7th century. The Hachijō language , spoken on the Izu Islands , is also included, but its position within the family is unclear. Most scholars believe that Japonic was brought to the Japanese archipelago from the Korean peninsula with the Yayoi culture during the 1st millennium BC. There is some fragmentary evidence suggesting that Japonic languages may still have been spoken in central and southern parts of

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2208-643: 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

2277-425: The Korean peninsula (see Peninsular Japonic ) in the early centuries AD. Possible genetic relationships with many other language families have been proposed, most systematically with Koreanic , but no genetic relationship has been conclusively demonstrated. The extant Japonic languages belong to two well-defined branches: Japanese and Ryukyuan. Most scholars believe that Japonic was brought to northern Kyushu from

2346-451: 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

2415-743: The Miyako dialect of Ōgami. Glottalized consonants are common in North Ryukyuan languages but are rarer in South Ryukyuan. Proto-Japonic had only voiceless obstruents, like Ainu and proto- Korean . Japonic languages also resemble Ainu and modern Korean in having a single liquid consonant phoneme. A five-vowel system like Standard Japanese /a/ , /i/ , /u/ , /e/ and /o/ is common, but some Ryukyuan languages also have central vowels /ə/ and /ɨ/ , and Yonaguni has only /a/ , /i/ , and /u/ . In most Japonic languages, speech rhythm

2484-513: The Tokyo dialect has several western features not found in other eastern dialects. The Hachijō language , spoken on Hachijō-jima and the Daitō Islands , including Aogashima , is highly divergent and varied. It has a mix of conservative features inherited from Eastern Old Japanese and influences from modern Japanese, making it difficult to classify. Hachijō is an endangered language , with

2553-575: 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

2622-605: 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

2691-425: The central "Kunigami" branch comprising varieties from Southern Amami to Northern Okinawan, based on similar vowel systems and patterns of lenition of stops. Pellard suggests a binary division based on shared innovations, with an Amami group including the varieties from Kikai to Yoron, and an Okinawa group comprising the varieties of Okinawa and smaller islands to its west. Southern Ryukyuan languages are spoken in

2760-408: 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

2829-458: The former kingdom of Goguryeo . As the pronunciations are given using Chinese characters , they are difficult to interpret, but several of those from central Korea, in the area south of the Han River captured from Baekje in the 5th century, seem to correspond to Japonic words. Scholars differ on whether they represent the language of Goguryeo or the people that it conquered. Traces from

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2898-492: 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,

2967-418: The introduction of Buddhism in the 6th century and peaking with the wholesale importation of Chinese culture in the 8th and the 9th centuries. The loanwords now account for about half the lexicon. They also affected the sound system of the language by adding compound vowels, syllable-final nasals, and geminate consonants, which became separate morae . Most of the changes in morphology and syntax reflected in

3036-577: 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

3105-456: 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

3174-507: The modern language took place during the Late Middle Japanese period (13th to 16th centuries). Modern mainland Japanese dialects , spoken on Honshu , Kyushu , Shikoku , and Hokkaido , are generally grouped as follows: The early capitals of Nara and Kyoto lay within the western area, and their Kansai dialect retained its prestige and influence long after the capital was moved to Edo (modern Tokyo) in 1603. Indeed,

3243-449: The moras of a word are pronounced high or low, but it follows widely-different patterns. In Tokyo-type systems, the basic pitch of a word is high, with an accent (if present) marking the position of a drop to low pitch. In Kyushu dialects, the basic pitch is low, with accented syllables given high pitch. In Kyoto-type systems, both types are used. Japonic languages, again like Ainu and Korean, are left-branching (or head-final ), with

3312-579: The northern part of the chain, including the major Amami and Okinawa Islands . They form a single dialect continuum , with mutual unintelligibility between widely separated varieties. The major varieties are, from northeast to southwest: There is no agreement on the subgrouping of the varieties. One proposal, adopted by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger , has three subgroups, with

3381-528: The pitch accent that she attributes to sea-borne contacts. Another alternative classification, proposed by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology as part of their Glottolog project, splits the Hachijō language into an independent branch of Japonic, in addition to splitting the divergent Kagoshima and Tsugaru dialects into independent branches of a "Japanesic" family. There

3450-544: 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 )

3519-545: 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

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3588-505: The pronunciation. There are many hypotheses to explain the distinction. However, it is not clear whether the distinction applied to the consonant, vowel, or something else. There is no general academic agreement. A word is consistently, without exception, written with syllables from a specific group. For example, /kami 1 / "above" and /kami 2 / "god". While both words end in /mi/ in later Japanese, mi 1 cannot substitute for mi 2 or vice versa. This strict distinction exists for all of

3657-677: The south of the peninsula are very sparse: According to Shirō Hattori , more attempts have been made to link Japanese with other language families than for any other language. None of the attempts has succeeded in demonstrating a common descent for Japonic and any other language family. The most systematic comparisons have involved Korean , which has a very similar grammatical structure to Japonic languages. Samuel Elmo Martin , John Whitman, and others have proposed hundreds of possible cognates, with sound correspondences. However, Alexander Vovin points out that Old Japanese contains several pairs of words of similar meaning in which one word matches

3726-528: The southern part of the chain, the Sakishima Islands . They comprise three distinct dialect continua: The southern Ryukyus were settled by Japonic-speakers from the northern Ryukyus in the 13th century, leaving no linguistic trace of the indigenous inhabitants of the islands. An alternative classification, based mainly on the development of the pitch accent , groups the highly divergent Kagoshima dialects of southwestern Kyushu with Ryukyuan in

3795-580: 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 ,

3864-416: The syllables marked in gray. This usage is also found in the verb morphology. The quadrigrade conjugation is as follows: The verb /sak-/ "bloom" has quadrigrade conjugation class. Thus, its conjugation is as follows: Before the jōdai tokushu kanazukai discovery, it was thought that quadrigrade realis and imperative shared the same form: -e. However, after the discovery, it became clear that realis

3933-436: 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

4002-656: 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

4071-525: The two branches must have separated before the 7th century. The move from Kyushu to the Ryukyus may have occurred later and possibly coincided with the rapid expansion of the agricultural Gusuku culture in the 10th and 11th centuries. Such a date would explain the presence in Proto-Ryukyuan of Sino-Japanese vocabulary borrowed from Early Middle Japanese . After the migration to the Ryukyus, there

4140-592: The type A vowels i 1 , e 1 , o 1 as yi, ye, wo, and writes i 2 , e 2 , o 2 as iy, ey, o̠ . When vowels lack the Type A vs. Type B distinction they are given unmodified spellings (i e o). Consequently, the type C syllables are distinguishable from both A and B type without any presumption of which, if any, of the other types they shared pronunciations with. These spellings are despite their appearance not intended as reconstructions, but as abstract notations that represent Old Japanese spelling without any commitment to

4209-693: 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

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4278-416: 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

4347-482: Was -e 2 while imperative was -e 1 . Also, jōdai tokushu kanazukai has a profound effect on etymology. It was once thought that /kami/ "above" and /kami/ "god" shared the same etymology, a god being an entity high above. However, after the discovery, it is known that "above" is /kami 1 / while "god" is /kami 2 /. Thus, they are distinct words. The following chart lists syllable and man'yōgana correspondences. The distinction between /mo 1 / and /mo 2 /

4416-576: Was limited influence from mainland Japan until the conquest of the Ryukyu Kingdom by the Satsuma Domain in 1609. Ryukyuan varieties are considered dialects of Japanese in Japan but have little intelligibility with Japanese or even among one another. They are divided into northern and southern groups, corresponding to the physical division of the chain by the 250 km-wide Miyako Strait . Northern Ryukyuan languages are spoken in

4485-410: Was predominantly subject–object–verb, with adjectives and adverbs preceding the nouns and verbs they modify and auxiliary verbs and particles consistently appended to the main verb. nanipa Naniwa no 2 GEN mi 1 ya court ni Japonic languages Japonic or Japanese–Ryukyuan ( Japanese : 日琉語族 , romanized :  Nichiryū gozoku ), sometimes also Japanic ,

4554-416: 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

4623-491: 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

4692-426: 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,

4761-419: 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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