Early Middle Japanese


Early Middle Japanese is a stage of the Japanese language between 794 and 1185, which is known as the Heian Period. The successor to Old Japanese, it is also known as Late Old Japanese. However, the term "Early Middle Japanese" is preferred, as it is closer to Late Middle Japanese than to Old Japanese.

Background

Old Japanese had borrowed and adapted the Chinese script to write Japanese. In Early Middle Japanese, two new scripts emerged: the kana scripts hiragana and katakana. That development simplified writing and brought about a new age in literature with many classics such as Genji Monogatari, Taketori Monogatari, and Ise Monogatari.

Phonology

Developments

Major phonological changes were characteristic of the period.
The most prominent difference was the loss of the Jōdai Tokushu Kanazukai, which distinguished two types of /i/, /e/ and /o/. While the start of the loss can already be seen at the end of Old Japanese, it was completely lost in Early Middle Japanese. The final distinction to be lost was /ko1, go1/ vs. /ko2, go2/.
In the 10th century, /e/ and /je/ merged into /je/, and /o/ and /wo/ had merged into /wo/ by the 11th century.
An increase in Chinese loanwords had a number of phonological effects:
The development of the uvular nasal and geminated consonants occurred late in the Heian period and brought about the introduction of closed syllables.

Phonetics

Vowels

Phonetic Realization

Theories for the realization of include,, and. It may have varied depending on the following vowel, like in Modern Japanese.
By the 11th century, had merged with between vowels.

Grammar

Syntactically, Early Middle Japanese was an subject-object-verb language with a topic-comment structure. Morphologically, it was an agglutinative language. Major word classes were nouns and pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and various grammatical particles. Nouns could be followed by particles to indicate case but also occurred without particle. Verbs had to be marked with affixes, many of which were inflected as verbs in their own right and so allowed the accumulation of complex strings of suffixes. Adjectives were largely inflected for the same categories as verbs and so are often referred to as stative verbs.

Nouns and pronouns

Nouns occurred with postpositive case particles such as these:
The nominative function was marked by the absence of a particle in main clauses and by the genitive particles in subordinate clauses. The dative/locative particle -ni sas homophonous with the simple infinitive form of the copula -ni, with verbal suffixes supplies more complex case markers -ni-te and -ni si-te or -ni-te. A number of particle + verb + -te sequences provided other case functions: -ni yori-te 'due to', -ni tuki-te 'about, concerning', and -to si-te 'as'. More complex structures were derived from genitive particle + Location Noun + appropriate case particle and were used particularly to express spatial and temporal relations. Major location nouns were mafe 'front', ufe 'top', sita 'under', saki 'ahead' ', etc.

Verbs

Early Middle Japanese verb inflection was agglutinative. All verbs were conjugated in a small number of 'stems' and could be combined with grammaticalized verbs to express tense, aspect, mood, voice, and polarity. Several of the grammaticalized verbs could combine in a string, and each component determined the choice of stem of the preceding component. A small number of other grammatical endings were not verbs but carried various co-ordinating or subordinating functions.
Early Middle Japanese inherited all eight verbal conjugations from Old Japanese and added one new one:.

Conjugation

Traditionally, verbs were divided into five regular conjugations: quadrigrade, upper monograde, lower monograde, upper bigrade, lower bigrade. There were also four 'irregular' conjugations: K-irregular, S-irregular, N-irregular, R-irregular. The conjugation of each is divided into six stems: irrealis, infinitive, conclusive, attributive, realis, and imperative. The English names for the irrealis and the realis differ from author to author, including negative and evidential, imperfective and perfective, or irrealis and realis.
Verb Class
-a-i-u-u-e-e
-i-i-iru-iru-ire-i
-i-i-u-uru-ure-i
-e-e-eru-eru-ere-e
-e-e-u-uru-ure-e
-o-i-u-uru-ure-o
-e-i-u-uru-ure-e
-a-i-u-uru-ure-e
-a-i-i-u-e-e

The system of nine conjugation classes appears to be complex. However, all nine conjugations can be subsumed into variations of two groups: the consonant-root verbs, and the vowel-root verbs. Consonant-root verbs were quadrigrade, N-irregular and R-irregular verbs. The irregularity of N-irregular verbs occurred only in the conclusive and the attributive, and as there are no quadrigrade verbs with n-roots, quadrigrade and N-irregular verb patterns may be treated as being in complementary distribution. Vowel-root verbs consist of bigrade verbs, a few monograde verbs, the K-irregular verb ko- 'come', and the S-irregular verb se- 'do'. The difference between 'upper' and 'lower' bigrade or monograde verbs is whether the vowel at the end of the root was i or e. There was only one 'lower' monograde verb, kwe- 'kick', which was a 'lower' bigrade verb kuwe- in Old Japanese, changed pronunciation to ke- in early Late Middle Japanese, and changed conjugation class again in later Japanese to become quadrigrade. The difference between bigrade and monograde was whether in the conclusive, attributive and realis the initial u of the ending elided the vowel of the root or the vowel of the roots elides the initial u of the ending.
There are problems with that arrangement of stems.
Verb endings are attached agglutinatively to the various stems of verbs. They are divided into endings that behave like verbs themselves and endings that act as conjunctions.

Verb-like endings

Verb-like endings behaved like verbs in that they exhibitef all or most of the stems that a lexical verb exhibits. The usual forms are listed below, and the way in which they were attached to the preceding verb follows the revised system of stems above. A verb could be followed by several such endings in a string.
Voice: 'passive' and 'causative':
Tense/Aspect:
Other aspectual functions can be expressed with auxiliaries that also exist as independent verbs:
Other auxiliaries express direction, either literally or metaphorically.
Mood:
Polarity:
There were two types of adjectives: regular adjectives and adjectival nouns.
The regular adjective was subdivided into two types: those for which the adverbial form ended in -ku and those that ended in -siku. That created two different types of conjugations:
Adjective Class
-ku -ku-si-ki-kere
-ku-kara-kari-si-karu -kare
-siku -siku-si-siki-sikere
-siku-sikara-sikari-si-sikaru -sikare

The class of siku-adjectives included a few adjectives that had z, rather than s: adverbial -ziku, conclusive -zi, attributive -ziki., e.g. imizi 'be terrible'. Onazi 'be the same' usually had -zi rather than -ziki, in its attributive form.
The -kar- and -sikar- forms were derived from the verb ar- "be, exists." The adverbial conjugation was suffixed with ar-. The conjugation yielded to the r-irregular conjugation of. The resulting -ua- elided into -a-.
The adjectival noun kept the original nar- conjugation and added a new tar-:
Type
Nar--nara-nari
-ni		-nari-naru-nare-nare
Tar--tara-tari
-to		-tari-taru-tare-tare

The nar- and tar- forms shared a common etymology. The nar- form was a contraction of the case particle ni and the r-irregular verb ar- "is, be": ni + ar- > nar-. The tar- form was a contraction of the case particle to and the r-irregular verb ar- "is, be": to + ar- > tar-. Both derived their conjugations from the verb.

Writing system

Early Middle Japanese was written in three different ways. It was first recorded in Man'yōgana, which is Chinese characters that were used as a phonetic transcription. That later produced the hiragana and the katakana syllabic scripts, which were derived from simplifications of the original Chinese characters.