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The kanbun writing system essentially required every literate Japanese to be competent in written Chinese, although it is unlikely that many Japanese people were then fluent in spoken Chinese. Chinese pronunciation was approximated in words borrowed from Chinese into Japanese; this Sino-Japanese vocabulary is still an important component of the ...
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.
For example, the modern version conclusive form of the classical verb 來 (く) (k-u "to come") is 来る (くる) (k-uru), but the modern form is given in the table as 来 (く) (k-u), which is the way that a modern Japanese writer would write the classical Japanese word, rather than the way they would write the modern Japanese word.
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.
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.
Precedence is given to grammar over pronunciation. For example, the verb warau (to laugh) is written わらふ warafu, and in accordance with Japanese grammar rules, waraō, the volitional form of warau, is written わらはう warahau. The kana づ du and ぢ di, which are mostly only used in rendaku in modern kana usage, are more common.
The romanization of Japanese is the use of Latin script to write the Japanese language. [1] This method of writing is sometimes referred to in Japanese as rōmaji ( ローマ字 , lit. ' Roman letters ' , [ɾoːma(d)ʑi] ⓘ or [ɾoːmaꜜ(d)ʑi] ) .
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 ...