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Some forms rather more familiar to Modern Japanese speakers begin to appear – the continuative ending -te begins to reduce onto the verb (e.g. yonde for earlier yomite), the -k- in the final mora of adjectives drops out (shiroi for earlier shiroki); and some forms exist where modern standard Japanese has retained the earlier form (e.g. hayaku ...
Japanese is the national and primary language of Japan. The language is a lexically distinct pitch-accent system. Early Japanese is known primarily by its state in the 8th century when the three major works of Old Japanese were compiled. The earliest attestation of the Japanese language was found in a Chinese document from 256 CE.
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.
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. [13] It differed from Modern Japanese in having a simple (C)V syllable structure and avoiding vowel sequences. [14]
Japanese is an agglutinative, synthetic, mora-timed language with simple phonotactics, a pure vowel system, phonemic vowel and consonant length, and a lexically significant pitch-accent. Word order is normally subject–object–verb with particles marking the grammatical function of words, and sentence structure is topic–comment .
The character entries give source citations, Chinese pronunciations, definitions, and Japanese readings in the ancient Man'yōgana character system. The c. 1444 Kagakushū (下学集) was an anonymous Muromachi era Japanese language dictionary or encyclopedia that defined some 3000 words into 18 semantic categories. It was designed for the ...
Modern kana usage (現代仮名遣い, gendai kanazukai) is the present official kanazukai (system of spelling the Japanese syllabary). Also known as new kana usage ( 新仮名遣い , shin kanazukai ) , it is derived from historical usage .