Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics
Official language of Japan, spoken by over 120 million speakers. Its genetic affinity is unclear; a relationship with Korean and the Altaic languages as well as with Malayo-Polynesian is often suggested. Ryukyu, the language of Okinawa, is closely related to Japanese. Japanese has many dialects; the standard is based on the dialect of Tokyo.
Written documents date from the eighth century. The writing system of modern Japanese is a combination of the Chinese logographic writing Kanji (for expressing lexical morphemes) and two independent syllabaries, Hiragana, originally a writing system for women, now used, among other things, for marking grammatical morphemes and functional words, and Katakana, now used, among other things, for foreign words. A normalized writing system in the Latin alphabet, Romaji, also exists. The syllabaries contain forty-six characters each; in everyday language about 2,000 Kanji characters are used.
Characteristics: relatively simple sound system and syllable structure, but numerous morphophonemic alternations (palatalization, affrication). Musical stress. Morphological type: agglutinating. Rich verbal inflection (tense, aspect, mood, voice, negation, politeness. but no agreement). No number distinction; in number constructions, classifiers are employed. Numerous ‘cases’ are indicated by postpositions. The topic is marked by the postposition -wa and does not have to be an argument of the verb; this led to the erroneously named ‘double subject’ sentences such as sakana wa tai ga ii ‘fish-TOP red snapper-SUBJ good’ (= ‘As far as fish are concerned, red snappers taste good’). Nominal sentential elements can often be omitted if the reference is clear from the context (so-called ‘zero anaphors’); one result of this is that pronouns are rarely used and can be derived from nouns, for which numerous forms are available for marking social position. Word order SOV; dependent clauses marked by participial forms of the verb.
References
Choi, S. 1993. Japanese/Korean linguistics, vol. 3. Chicago, IL.
Clancy, P. 1993. Japanese/Korean linguistics, vol.
2. Chicago, IL.
Hinds, J. 1986. Japanese. London.
Hoji, H. 1993. Japanese/Korean linguistics. Chicago, IL.
Kuno, S. 1973. The structure of the Japanese language. Cambridge, MA.
Lewin, B. et al. 1989. Sprache und Schrift Japans. (Handbuch der Orientalistik 5, vol. 1, 2.) Leiden.
Miller, R.A. 1967. The Japanese language. Chicago, IL.
——1980. The origin of the Japanese language. Washington, DC.
Shibatani, M. 1976. Syntax and semantics, vol. 5: Japanese generative grammar. New York, San Francisco, and London.
——1990. The languages of Japan. Cambridge.
Twine, N. 1991. Language and the modern state: the reform of written Japanese. London.
Wenck, G. 1966. The phonemics of Japanese: questions and attempts. Wiesbaden.
Dictionary
Hepburn, J.C. 1988. A Japanese and English dictionary with an English and Japanese index. Rutland.
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