Japanese, The Spoken Language – Part 1 (Yale Language Series)

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The following languages are listed as having 45 million or more total speakers in the 26th edition of Ethnologue published in 2023. [4] Entries identified by Ethnologue as macrolanguages (such as Arabic, Persian, Malay, Pashto, Sindhi, and Chinese, encompassing all their respective varieties) are not included in this section. The writing system is the most obvious difference between Japanese and many other languages. There’s also: The word da (plain), desu (polite) is the copula verb. It corresponds approximately to the English be, but often takes on other roles, including a marker for tense, when the verb is conjugated into its past form datta (plain), deshita (polite). This comes into use because only i-adjectives and verbs can carry tense in Japanese. Two additional common verbs are used to indicate existence ("there is") or, in some contexts, property: aru (negative nai) and iru (negative inai), for inanimate and animate things, respectively. For example, Neko ga iru "There's a cat", Ii kangae-ga nai "[I] haven't got a good idea". An increasingly popular theory along that line posits that the mixed nature of Japanese results from its Austronesian lexical substratum and the Altaic grammatical superstratum. According to one version of that hypothesis, a language of southern origin with a phonological system like those of Austronesian languages was spoken in Japan during the prehistoric Jōmon era ( c. 10,500 to c. 300 bce). As the Yayoi culture was introduced to Japan from the Asian continent about 300 bce, a language of southern Korea began to spread eastward from the southern island of Kyushu along with that culture, which also introduced to Japan iron and bronze implements and the cultivation of rice. Because the migration from Korea did not take place on a large scale, the new language did not eradicate certain older lexical items, though it was able to change the grammatical structure of the existing language. Thus, that theory maintains, Japanese must be said to be genetically related to Korean (and perhaps ultimately to Altaic languages), though it contains Austronesian lexical residues. The Altaic theory, however, is not widely accepted. Dialects

For Japanese learners, especially those that grew up speaking a Latin or Germanic language, this is a welcome relief. Tones can be very difficult for some learners to get used to, after all. 4. However, Japanese does have a pitch accent

17. The first Japanese-English dictionary to feature romaji was published in the 19th century

It’s estimated that up to 7,000 different languages are spoken around the world. 90% of these languages are used by less than 100,000 people. Over a million people converse in 150-200 languages and 46 languages have just a single speaker! Several fossilizations of Old Japanese grammatical elements remain in the modern language – the genitive particle tsu (superseded by modern no) is preserved in words such as matsuge ("eyelash", lit. "hair of the eye"); modern mieru ("to be visible") and kikoeru ("to be audible") retain a mediopassive suffix - yu(ru) ( kikoyu → kikoyuru (the attributive form, which slowly replaced the plain form starting in the late Heian period) → kikoeru (all verbs with the shimo-nidan conjugation pattern underwent this same shift in Early Modern Japanese)); and the genitive particle ga remains in intentionally archaic speech.

Labrune, Laurence (2012). The Phonology of Japanese. The Phonology of the World's Languages. Oxford University Press. pp.89–91. doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199545834.003.0003. ISBN 978-0-19-954583-4. Archived from the original on 2021-10-27 . Retrieved 2021-10-14. The nasal is sensitive to its phonetic environment and assimilates to the following phoneme, with pronunciations including [ɴ, m, n, ɲ, ŋ, ɰ̃]. Onset-glide clusters only occur at the start of syllables but clusters across syllables are allowed as long as the two consonants are the moraic nasal followed by a homorganic consonant. The phonotactics of Japanese are relatively simple. The syllable structure is (C)(G)V(C), [38] that is, a core vowel surrounded by an optional onset consonant, a glide /j/ and either the first part of a geminate consonant ( っ/ ッ, represented as Q) or a moraic nasal in the coda ( ん/ ン, represented as N). Another uncommon feature of the text is that it emphasizes Japanese pitch accent in the words, according to standard Japanese.We just don’t know very much about Japan during the Yayoi period at all. Anthropologists have deduced that the earliest recorded text that contains writing similar to 漢字

While the language has some words that are typically translated as pronouns, these are not used as frequently as pronouns in some Indo-European languages, and function differently. In some cases, Japanese relies on special verb forms and auxiliary verbs to indicate the direction of benefit of an action: "down" to indicate the out-group gives a benefit to the in-group, and "up" to indicate the in-group gives a benefit to the out-group. Here, the in-group includes the speaker and the out-group does not, and their boundary depends on context. For example, oshiete moratta ( 教えてもらった) (literally, "explaining got" with a benefit from the out-group to the in-group) means "[he/she/they] explained [it] to [me/us]". Similarly, oshiete ageta ( 教えてあげた) (literally, "explaining gave" with a benefit from the in-group to the out-group) means "[I/we] explained [it] to [him/her/them]". Such beneficiary auxiliary verbs thus serve a function comparable to that of pronouns and prepositions in Indo-European languages to indicate the actor and the recipient of an action. The basic sentence structure is topic–comment. For example, Kochira wa Tanaka-san desu ( こちらは田中さんです). kochira ("this") is the topic of the sentence, indicated by the particle wa. The verb desu is a copula, commonly translated as "to be" or "it is" (though there are other verbs that can be translated as "to be"), though technically it holds no meaning and is used to give a sentence 'politeness'. As a phrase, Tanaka-san desu is the comment. This sentence literally translates to "As for this person, (it) is Mx Tanaka." Thus Japanese, like many other Asian languages, is often called a topic-prominent language, which means it has a strong tendency to indicate the topic separately from the subject, and that the two do not always coincide. The sentence Zō wa hana ga nagai ( 象は鼻が長い) literally means, "As for elephant(s), (the) nose(s) (is/are) long". The topic is zō "elephant", and the subject is hana "nose".But there’s another, more old-fashioned (and, I daresay, more challenging) way to learn hiragana and that is through the いろは ( iroha) system. It’s essentially a poem where all of the hiragana characters (including archaic ones) appear exactly once. If learning through Japanese poems is more your style, go for it! 13. You should know about 連濁 What that means is, while you can say a lot of stuff in Japanese, you also don’t give a lot of information. This isn’t too surprising when you think about it—it takes almost all eight syllables just to say “not.” The choice of words used as pronouns is correlated with the sex of the speaker and the social situation in which they are spoken: men and women alike in a formal situation generally refer to themselves as watashi ( 私, literally "private") or watakushi (also 私, hyper-polite form), while men in rougher or intimate conversation are much more likely to use the word ore ( 俺 "oneself", "myself") or boku. Similarly, different words such as anata, kimi, and omae ( お前, more formally 御前 "the one before me") may refer to a listener depending on the listener's relative social position and the degree of familiarity between the speaker and the listener. When used in different social relationships, the same word may have positive (intimate or respectful) or negative (distant or disrespectful) connotations. Literacy was introduced to Japan in the form of the Chinese writing system, by way of Baekje before the 5th century. [44] [45] [46] [47] Using this language, the Japanese king Bu presented a petition to Emperor Shun of Liu Song in AD 478. [a] After the ruin of Baekje, Japan invited scholars from China to learn more of the Chinese writing system. Japanese emperors gave an official rank to Chinese scholars ( 続守言/薩弘恪/ [b] [c] 袁晋卿 [d]) and spread the use of Chinese characters from the 7th century to the 8th century. Tagalog and Filipino are defined as two different languages in the ISO 639 standard. Ethnologue considers that Filipino is a standardized variety of the Tagalog language with no speakers.