Old Japanese


Old Japanese is the oldest attested stage of the Japanese language. Attested in documents from the Nara period, it became Early Middle Japanese in the succeeding Heian period, but the precise separation of both languages is controversial.
Old Japanese was an early member of the Japonic family, but no conclusive links to other language families have been proved.
Old Japanese was written using Chinese characters by using an increasingly-standardized and phonetic form that eventually evolved into man'yōgana. Typically for a Japonic language and for a step in the evolutionary line of modern Japanese, Old Japanese was a primarily-agglutinative language with a subject–object–verb word order. However, Old Japanese was marked by a few phonemic differences from later forms, such as a simpler syllable structure and distinctions between several pairs of syllables that would have been pronounced identically since Early Middle Japanese. The phonetic realization of the differentiation is uncertain.

Writing system

Artifacts inscribed with Chinese characters dated as early as the 1st century AD have been found in Japan, but detailed knowledge of the script seemed not to have arrived in the islands until the early 5th century.
According to the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, the script was brought by scholars from Baekje.
The earliest texts found in Japan were written in Classical Chinese, probably by immigrant scribes.
Later "hybrid" texts show the influence of Japanese grammar, such as the word order.
Chinese and Koreans had long used Chinese characters to write non-Chinese terms and proper names phonetically by selecting characters for Chinese words that sounded similar to each syllable.
Koreans also used the characters phonetically to write Korean particles and inflections that were added to Chinese texts to aid reading them.
In Japan, the practice was developed into man'yōgana, a complete script for the language that used Chinese characters phonetically, and it was the ancestor of modern kana syllabaries.
This system was already in use in the verse parts of the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki.
For example, the first line of the first poem in the Kojiki was written with five characters:
This method of writing Japanese syllables by using characters for their Chinese sounds was supplemented with indirect methods in the complex mixed script of the Man'yōshū.

Syllables

In man'yōgana, each Old Japanese syllable was represented by a Chinese character. Although any of several characters could be used for a given syllable, a careful analysis reveals that 88 syllables were distinguished in the Kojiki:
akagasazatadanapabamayarawa
iki1gi1sizitidinipi1bi1mi1riwi
iki2gi2sizitidinipi2bi2mi2riwi
ukugusuzutudunupubumuyuru
eke1ge1sezetedenepe1be1me1yerewe
eke2ge2sezetedenepe2be2me2yerewe
oko1go1so1zo1to1do1no1pobomo1yo1ro1wo
oko2go2so2zo2to2do2no2pobomo2yo2ro2wo

The system has the same gaps of yi and wu that were found in later forms of Japanese. However, many syllables that have a modern i, e or o occurred in two forms, termed types A and B, denoted by subscripts 1 and 2 respectively in the above table.
The syllables mo1 and mo2 are not distinguished in the slightly-later Nihon Shoki and Man'yōshū, reducing the syllable count to 87.
All of those pairs had merged by the Early Middle Japanese of the Heian period.

Transcription

Several different notations for the type A/B distinction are found in the literature, including:
indexed notationi1i2e1e2o1o2
Kindaichi, Miller, Ōnoiïeëoö
modified Mathias–Millerîïêëôö
Yale yiiyyeeywoo̠
Frellesvig and Whitmaniwiyeewoo

Phonology

There is no consensus on the pronunciation of the syllables distinguished by man'yōgana.
One difficulty is that the Middle Chinese pronunciations of the characters used are also disputed, and since the reconstruction of their phonetic values is partly based on later Sino-Japanese pronunciations, there is a danger of circular reasoning.
Additional evidence has been drawn from phonological typology, subsequent developments in the Japanese pronunciation, and the comparative study of the Ryukyuan languages.

Restrictions

Old Japanese had open syllables of the form V subject to additional restrictions:
In 1934, Arisaka Hideyo proposed a set of phonological restrictions permitted in a single morpheme. Arisaka's Law states that -o2 was generally not found in the same morpheme as -a, -o1 or -u.
Some scholars have interpreted that as a vestige of earlier vowel harmony, but it is very different from patterns that are observed in, for example, the Turkic languages.

Vowels

The Chinese characters chosen to write syllables with the Old Japanese vowel a suggest that it was an open unrounded vowel.
The vowel u was a close back rounded vowel, unlike the unrounded of Modern Standard Japanese.
Several hypotheses have been advanced to explain the A/B distinctions made in man'yōgana. The issue is hotly debated, and there is no consensus.
The widely-accepted and traditional view, first advanced by Kyōsuke Kindaichi in 1938, is that there were eight pure vowels, with the type B vowels being more central than their type A counterparts.
Others, beginning in the 1930s but more commonly since the work of Roland Lange in 1968, have attributed the type A/B distinction to medial or final glides and.
The diphthong proposals are often connected to hypotheses on pre-Old Japanese, but all exhibit an uneven distribution of glides.
i1i2e1e2o1o2Author
Kikusawa
Kindaichi, Miller
Arisaka
Hattori
Lange
Unger, Frellesvig and Whitman
Ōno
Miyake

The distinction between mo1 and mo2 was seen only in Kojiki and vanished afterwards.
Distributionally, there may have once been *po1, *po2, *bo1 and *bo2.
If that was true, a distinction was made between Co1 and Co2 for all consonants C except for w. Some take that to support that Co1 may have represented Cwo.

Pre-Old Japanese

Most scholars derive the Old Japanese vowel system from an earlier four-vowel system, with the most common Old Japanese vowels a, u, i1 and o2 reflecting earlier *a, *u, *i and *ə respectively.
Internal reconstruction suggests that the other, less common, Old Japanese vowels were derived from fusions of those vowels.
For example, the place name take2ti is derived from a compound of taka- 'high' and iti 'market'.
Another piece of evidence is that many nouns had different forms, depending on whether they were used independently or within compounds: sake2 'rice wine', which became saka- in compounds such as sakaduki 'saké cup'.
In such cases, the bound form is considered basic, and the independent form may be explained by postulating a suffix *-i that later fused with the final vowel of the root.
The following reductions are proposed:
There are also alternations suggesting e2 < *əi, such as:
Some authors believe that they belong to an earlier layer than i2 < *əi, but others reconstruct two central vowels *ə and *ɨ, which merged everywhere except before *i.
Other authors attribute the variation to different reflexes in different dialects and note that *əi yields e in Ryukyuan languages.
Some authors also postulate *e and *o to account for word-final e1 and o1 respectively.
A few alternations, as well as comparisons with Eastern Old Japanese and Ryukyuan languages, suggest that *e and *o also occurred in non-word-final positions at an earlier stage but were raised in such positions to i1 and u, respectively, in Central Old Japanese.
The mid vowels are also found in some early mokkan and in some modern Japanese dialects.

Consonants

Miyake reconstructed the following inventory, in addition to a zero vowel-initial onset :
The voiceless obstruents had the voiced prenasalized counterparts.
Prenasalization still occurred in the late 17th century and is found in some Modern Japanese and Ryukyuan dialects, but it has disappeared in Modern Japanese except for the intervocalic nasal stop allophone of.
The sibilants and may have been palatalized before e and i.
Comparative evidence from Ryukyuan languages suggests that Old Japanese p continued an earlier voiceless bilabial stop *p.
There is general agreement that word-initial p had become a voiceless bilabial fricative by Early Middle Japanese, as suggested by its transcription as f in later Portuguese works and as ph or hw in the Korean textbook Ch'ŏphae Sinŏ. In Modern Standard Japanese, it is romanized as h and has different allophones before various vowels. In medial position, it became in Early Middle Japanese but has disappeared except before a.
Many scholars argue that p had already lenited to by Old Japanese, but Miyake argues that it was still a stop.

Pre-Old Japanese

Internal reconstruction suggests that the Old Japanese voiced obstruents, which always occurred in medial position, arose from the weakening of earlier nasal syllables before voiceless obstruents:
In some cases, there is no evidence for a preceding vowel, which leads some scholars to posit final nasals at the earlier stage.
Some linguists suggest that Old Japanese w and y derive, respectively, from *b and *d at some point before the oldest inscriptions in the 6th century.
Southern Ryukyuan varieties such as Miyako, Yaeyama and Yonaguni have corresponding to Old Japanese w, but only Yonaguni has where Old Japanese has y:
However, many linguists, especially in Japan, argue that the Southern Ryukyuan voiced stops are local innovations, adducing a variety of reasons.
Some supporters of *b and *d also add *z and *g, which both disappeared in Old Japanese, for reasons of symmetry.
However, there is very little Japonic evidence for them.

Morphophonemics

Vowel elision or fusion occurred to prevent vowel clusters.
When a monosyllabic morpheme was followed by a polysyllabic morpheme that began with a vowel, the second vowel was dropped:
In other environments, the first vowel was dropped:
Elsewhere, the vowels appear to have fused:
Although modern Japanese dialects have pitch accent systems, they were usually not shown in man'yōgana. However, in one part of the Nihon Shoki, the Chinese characters appeared to have been chosen to represent a pitch pattern similar to that recorded in the Ruiju Myōgishō, a dictionary that was compiled in the late 11th century. In that section, a low pitch syllable was represented by a character with the Middle Chinese level tone, and a high pitch was represented by a character with one of the other three Middle Chinese tones.
Thus, it appears that the Old Japanese accent system was similar to that of Early Middle Japanese.

Grammar

As in later forms of Japanese, Old Japanese word order was predominantly subject–object–verb, with adjectives and adverbs preceding the nouns and verbs they modify and auxiliary verbs and particles consistently appended to the main verb.

Pronouns

Many Old Japanese pronouns had both a short form and a longer form with attached -re of uncertain etymology.
If the pronoun occurred in isolation, the longer form was used.
With genitive particles or in nominal compounds, the short form was used, but in other situations, either form was possible.
Personal pronouns were distinguished by taking the genitive marker ga, in contrast to the marker no2 used with demonstratives and nouns.
Demonstratives often distinguished proximal and non-proximal forms marked with ko2- and so2- respectively.
Many forms had corresponding interrogative forms i-.
ProximalNon-proximalInterrogative
Nominalko2so2idu
Locationko2ko2so2ko2iduku
Directionko2tiso2tiiduti
Degreeko2kV-so2kV-iku-
Mannerkasate–
Mannerkakusikaika
Time––itu

In Early Middle Japanese, the non-proximal so- forms were reinterpreted as hearer-based, and the speaker-based forms were divided into proximal ko- forms and distal ka-/a- forms, yielding the three-way distinction that is still found in Modern Japanese.

Verbs

Old Japanese had a richer system of verbal suffixes than later forms of Japanese.
Old Japanese verbs used inflection for modal and conjunctional purposes.
Other categories, such as voice, tense, aspect and mood, were expressed by using optional suffixed auxiliaries, which were also inflected.

Inflected forms

As in later forms of Japanese, Old Japanese verbs had a large number of inflected forms.
In traditional Japanese grammar, they are represented by six forms from which all the others may be derived in a similar fashion to the principal parts used for Latin and other languages:
;'
;'
;'
;'
;'
;'
This system has been criticized because the six forms are not equivalent, with one being solely a combinatory stem, three solely word forms, and two being both. It also fails to capture some inflected forms.
However, five of the forms are basic inflected verb forms, and the system also describes almost all extended forms consistently.

Conjugation classes

Japanese verbs are classified into eight conjugation classes, each being characterized by different patterns of inflected forms.
Three of the classes are grouped as consonant bases:
;'
;'
;'
Verb classIrrealisInfinitiveConclusiveAdnominalExclamatoryImperativeGloss
Quadrigradekaka-kaki1kakukakukake2kake1'write'
n-irregularsina-sinisinusinurusinuresine'die'
r-irregularara-ariariaruareare'be, exist'

The distinctions between i1 and i2 and between e1 and e2 were eliminated after s, z, t, d, n, y, r and w.
There were five vowel-base conjugation classes:
;'
;'
;'
;'
;'
Early Middle Japanese also had a category, consisting of a single verb kwe- 'kick', which reflected the Old Japanese lower bigrade verb kuwe-.
Verb classIrrealisInfinitiveConclusiveAdnominalExclamatoryImperativeGloss
e-bigradeake2-ake2akuakuruakureake2'open'
i-bigradeoki2-oki2okuokuruokureoki2'arise'
monogrademi1-mi1mi1rumi1rumi1remi1'see'
k-irregularko2-ki1kukurukureko2'come'
s-irregularse-sisusurusurese'do'

The bigrade verbs seem to belong to a later layer than the consonant-base verbs.
Many e-bigrade verbs are transitive or intransitive counterparts of consonant-stem verbs.
In contrast, i-bigrade verbs tend to be intransitive.
Some bigrade bases also appear to reflect pre-Old-Japanese adjectives with vowel stems combined with an inchoative *-i suffix:
Old Japanese adjectives were originally nominals and, unlike in later periods, could be used to modify nouns that followed.
They could also be conjugated as stative verbs and were divided into two classes:
ClassStemInfinitiveConclusiveAdnominalExclamatoryGloss
-kukatakatakukatasikataki1katasa'hard'
-sikukusikusikukusikusiki1kusisa'precious'

The second class had stems ending in -si, which differed only in the conclusive form, whose suffix -si was dropped by haplology.
Adjectives of this class tended to express more subjective qualities.
Many of them were formed from a verbal stem by the addition of a suffix -si, of uncertain origin.
A more expressive conjugation emerged towards the end of Old Japanese by adding the verb ar- 'be' to the infinitive, with the sequence -ua- reducing to -a-:
IrrealisInfinitiveAdnominalGloss
katakara-katakarikatakaru'hard'

Many adjectival nouns of Early Middle Japanese were based on Old Japanese adjectives that were formed with suffixes -ka, -raka or -yaka.

Dialects

Although most Old Japanese writing represents the language of the Nara court in central Japan, some sources come from eastern Japan:
They record Eastern Old Japanese dialects, with the following features:
*