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4 days ago · Japanese language, a language isolate (i.e., a language unrelated to any other language) and one of the world’s major languages, with more than 127 million speakers in the early 21st century. It is primarily spoken throughout the Japanese archipelago; there are also some 1.5 million Japanese immigrants and their descendants living abroad ...
- Masayoshi Shibatani
Japanese (日本語, Nihongo, [ɲihoŋɡo] ⓘ) is the principal language of the Japonic language family spoken by the Japanese people. It has around 120 million speakers, primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language, and within the Japanese diaspora worldwide. The Japonic family also includes the Ryukyuan languages ...
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The problem of the origins of the Japanese language is a vexing one, and it was a subject of a long debate between many competing hypotheses starting roughly in the mid- 19th century, although one of these hypotheses, namely the Japanese-Korean hypothesis (which is still very influential today), was first proposed much earlier at the end of ...
Sep 6, 1999 · Japanese writing is clearly taken from Chinese, but the language itself (i.e. speech) is a mystery. The feature of spoken Japanese that applies most directly to my arguments is its vowel system, with open syllables. There are five vowel phonemes in Modern Japanese, namely /a/, /i/, /u/, /e/, /o/. Unlike English, lengthened vowels are important ...
Apr 11, 2023 · Ninigi’s great-grandson Jimmu, aided by a dazzling sacred bird that rendered his enemies helpless, became the first emperor of Japan in 660 b.c. To fill the gap between 660 b.c. and the earliest historically documented Japanese monarchs, the chronicles invented 13 other equally fictitious emperors.
The earliest version of Japanese we’ve got records of, “Old Japanese” is deeply linked to the disembark of Buddhism in the islands, during the 6th-8th centuries. One of the language’s earliest texts, written in kanbun (using exclusively Chinese characters), is Kojiki, a collection of mythical poems penned by Buddhist monks.
The language of Japan evolved and underwent several phonological changes, becoming Early Middle Japanese in the Heian period (794 to 1185). This language was the literary standard in Japan and incorporated many Chinese loanwords. The Late Middle Japanese period followed and spanned from 1185 to 1600, characterised by the addition of European ...
