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Early Modern Japanese (近世日本語, kinsei nihongo) was the stage of the Japanese language after Middle Japanese and before Modern Japanese. [1] It is a period of transition that shed many of the characteristics that Middle Japanese had retained during the language's development from Old Japanese , thus becoming intelligible to modern Japanese.
The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana.Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis.
While many other native Japanese words (for example, 汝 nanji archaic word for "you") with ん were once pronounced and/or written with む (mu), proper historical kana only uses む for ん in the case of the auxiliary verb, which is only used in classical Japanese, and has morphed into the volitional ～う (-u) form in modern Japanese.
An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and emphasis.. Most national and international languages have an established writing system that has undergone substantial standardization, thus exhibiting less dialect variation than the spoken language.
Japanese is written without spaces between words, and in some cases, such as compounds, it may not be completely clear where word boundaries should lie, resulting in varying romanization styles. For example, 結婚する , meaning "to marry", and composed of the noun 結婚 ( kekkon , "marriage") combined with する ( suru , "to do"), is ...
Gairaigo are Japanese words originating from, or based on, foreign-language, generally Western, terms.These include wasei-eigo (Japanese pseudo-anglicisms).Many of these loanwords derive from Portuguese, due to Portugal's early role in Japanese-Western interaction; Dutch, due to the Netherlands' relationship with Japan amidst the isolationist policy of sakoku during the Edo period; and from ...
There were no small kana in the pre-reform system; thus, for example, きよ would be ambiguous between kiyo and kyo while かつた could be either katsuta or katta. The pronunciation of medial h-row kana as w-row kana in the pre-reform system does not extend to compound words; thus, にほん was pronounced nihon, not nion (via **niwon).
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 the syllables marked in gray.