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For example, in the Japanese language up to and including the first half of the 20th century, the phonemic sequence /ti/ was palatalized and realized phonetically as [tɕi], approximately chi (listen ⓘ); however, now [ti] and [tɕi] are distinct, as evidenced by words like tī [tiː] "Western-style tea" and chii [tɕii] "social status".
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 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.
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 .
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 ...
Yakuwarigo (Japanese: 役割語, "role language") is a style of language, often used in works of fiction, that conveys certain traits about its speaker such as age, gender, and class. [1] It is particularly used in reference to the styles of speech found in Japanese-language media such as manga , anime , and novels.
For example, in the two-syllable word mōra, the ō is a long vowel and counts as two morae. The word is written in three symbols, モーラ, corresponding here to mo-o-ra, each containing one mora. Therefore, the 5/7/5 pattern of the haiku in modern Japanese is of morae rather than syllables.