Origins and development of the Japanese language

Author: Edutraveller
Date written: 2003/05/22 20:52:09
Last edited: 2003/05/25 16:52:51
Keywords: Japanese, Japanese language, Origins and development, History of the Japanese language, Origins of the Japanese language

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Origins of the Japanese language

While Japanese might look similar to Chinese at first glance because of the use of similar characters, the two languages are not related. Their grammar bears no resemblance, and the roots of the two languages are totally independent. Japanese is a polysyllabic language, bitonal (there are two pitches used), and agglutinative. Sentences are constructed around a SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) order. Chinese (a member of the Sino-Tibetan language group) is a largely syllabic, tonal language, with the same SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) order as Indo-European languages.

Korean is perhaps the closest of languages to Japanese, sharing a similar syntax. However, while most claim that Japanese like Korean is an Altaic language (along with Mongolian, Turkish and a few other central-Asian tongues), there remain many differences. The large shared vocabulary is almost entirely due to words having been imported from China along with the Chinese writing system. The main problem is to determine the origin of the remaining early words in Japanese that are not loan words from Korean or Chinese. If Korean and Japanese are in fact related, they appear to have diverged at least 5,000 years ago. Ainu is also linguistically isolated, with no apparent relationship to Japanese at all.

Japanese is often regarded today as a mixture of two main influences: a largely northern syntax, perhaps arriving in Japan from the Korean peninsula, and a southern (Austronesian) lexicon, arriving first from southeast Asia and India. It is suggested that the Jomon period inhabitants of Japan (7500 BC to c. 250 BC) spoke a language that originated in Southeast Asia, which would also suggest that they themselves also originated there. The start of Yayoi culture in Japan at the end of the Jomon period is supposed to have been brought about by the introduction of technology from Korea (iron, bronze, wet rice cultivation) and the people that brought it. The theory holds that since only a few people came across from Korea to Kyushu, and then spread out over the country, the incoming language did not replace the existing one, but rather just changed its grammatical structure. Proponents of this theory hold that for this reason, Japanese should be regarded as a relative of Korean and consequently a member of the Altaic group of languages.

Whatever the true origins of the language, modern Japanese consists of many foreign loan words - in fact, over half of all Japanese words are of Chinese origin. During the Edo Period and shortly before, most load words came from Dutch and Portuguese, and later French, (mostly British) English and German. Today, American English is the largest source of foreign words.

The Japanese language has a very rigid phonetic structure, with a fixed number of permissible sounds. These are all syllabic, consisting of consonant+vowel or vowel alone (or a consonantal "n"). In the process of evolution, the tonal variations of Chinese have been lost, leading to a large number of homophones. Thus, context is vital in understanding spoken Japanese (in the written form of course, different Chinese characters establish meaning for homophones). Also, words are regularly abbreviated, so that a four-kanji compound may be reduced to a two-kanji word. This same process is applied to loan words from European languages, the sounds of which are first forced into the syllabic straightjacket to fit the Japanese pronunciation. Thus, in many if not most cases, a native speaker of the language that loaned the word may not recognise the Japanese pronunciation (often to the surprise of the Japanese native speaker).

While it remains to be seen for certain, some claim that Japan is one of the Altaic languages and shares a common parent with Korean (see Miller in the references below for an explanation and discussion). Where the Altaic and Japanese languages parted company is disputed; it seems clear however that there was some common root in the distant past. The whole matter is however complicated by the fact that it is naturally related to the question of the origins of the Japanese race, a subject that is less widely discussed.