Japanese Language

I

Introduction

Japanese Language, agglutinative language spoken by an estimated 121,050,000 inhabitants of Japan, 10,000 in Taiwan, and by Japanese living in Australasia, Hawaii, and on the North and South American mainlands, particularly Brazil.

No certain relation between Japanese and other languages has been established, although it is classed as being from the Japanese language family of 12 languages, in a sub-group of its own. Structural similarities suggest a possible remote relationship with the Korean language and with the Altaic languages, including Manchu, Mongolian, and Turkish. Several scholars doubt this theory, however, because of the lack of vocabulary resemblances. Some vocabulary links, however, do exist between Japanese and East Asian language groups such as Tibeto-Burman and Austro-Asiatic. Luchuan, the language of the Ryukyu Islands, is so similar to Japanese that it is considered a dialect variant of it.

Compared with the Indo-European languages, Japanese appears vague and imprecise. The Japanese seem to prefer a certain kind of imprecision to precision, and they deliberately phrase their sentences vaguely. This is especially true in regard to visual impressions. For instance, the Japanese word aoi may mean either blue, green, or pale. On the other hand, the language is minutely precise in regard to auditory or tactile impressions. It contains a vast number of onomatopoeic expressions and different words for slight differences of sound or tactile sensation. It contains, for example, different words for the clatter of hoofs and the clatter of wooden-soled shoes and numerous words for the different sounds of rain and of rain falling on different places.

II

Vocabulary

Originally the vocabulary of Japanese was extremely limited. Beginning in the 3rd century ad, however, a large number of Chinese words were incorporated into the language. Japanese words of Chinese origin are somewhat comparable in function to English words derived from Greek and Latin. During the periods when the Japanese adopted them, these words were pronounced in Japanese approximately as they were in Chinese, but subsequently their pronunciation was modified considerably. The Chinese characters play a significant role in the word formation of written Japanese, which inevitably influences the spoken language. Every character usually has two or more sound readings, closely associated to one another and alternating freely in word formation. Japanese has borrowed many words from European languages during the last 100 years, mostly from English. This process has been greatly accelerated in the post-World War II period.

III

Phonology

The Japanese language has a simple phonology consisting of only five vowels, which are Romanized as a, i, u, e, and o and are pronounced somewhat as in Italian; and of 19 consonants, Romanized as k, s, sh, t, ch, ts, n, h, f, m, y, r, w, g, z, j, d, b, and p. The consonants are pronounced rather like the corresponding English consonants, but r is produced by flapping the tip of the tongue far forward in the mouth. In the body of a word, g is often nasalized, in a manner somewhat comparable to the ng in the English word sing. This feature is most prominent in the educated speech of Tokyo. The f is also different from the English f in that it is produced with the lips not touching each other, and in some speakers it is almost indistinguishable from an h. Japanese vowels and consonants may be either short or long. Certain syllables are emphasized in Japanese by differences of pitch or tone, but the language possesses no true stress accent.

IV

Grammar

The order of words in a Japanese sentence is usually that of subject, object, and verb; modifiers normally precede the words they modify. The Japanese verb denotes neither number nor person and has no tense as this term is understood in relation to the Indo-European languages. Despite the lack of a true future tense in Japanese, the verb carefully indicates whether or not an action is completed. Japanese has three conjugations of verbs, each with five basic forms: the negative, the continuative, the conclusive, the conditional, and the imperative. Four important irregular verbs also occur in Japanese, including the copula. Japanese nouns have neither gender nor number. Although no articles or prepositions exist in Japanese, the nouns are governed by postpositions (a relatively small group of words corresponding in use to Indo-European case endings and prepositions) that directly follow them. An example is the word no (“of”) in the phrase mizu no oto, which means “sound of water”, but translated word for word reads “water of sound”. Many pronouns exist in Japanese, but they are rarely used. True adjectives in Japanese, like the verbs, are highly inflected and function to a great extent like verbs, in that they contain the copula and by difference of inflection indicate a present state, a completed state, or a continuing or connective state. For instance, shiroi means “is white”, shirokatta means “was white” (a completed state), and shirokute means “is white and”. Some nouns are also used to modify other nouns in the manner of adjectives.

Probably the linguistic feature that more than any other distinguishes Japanese from other languages is the large number of polite, honorific, and humilific words and of word forms such as prefixes and suffixes. Only Korean and Javanese contain a comparable number of words indicating status. Although many dialectal variants occur within the Japanese language, the educated speech of Tokyo has been accepted as standard.