Old Japanese


Old Japanese is the oldest attested stage of the Japanese language, recorded in documents from the Nara period. It became Early Middle Japanese in the succeeding Heian period.
Old Japanese is an early member of the Japonic language family. No genetic links to other language families have been proven.
The bulk of the Old Japanese corpus consists of poetry, especially the Man'yōshū, with a smaller number of formal prose works. These texts were written using man'yōgana, a writing system that employs Chinese characters as syllabograms or logograms. The language featured a few phonological differences from later forms, such as a simpler syllable structure and distinctions between several pairs of syllables that have been pronounced identically since Early Middle Japanese. The phonetic realization of these distinctions is uncertain. Internal reconstruction points to a pre-Old Japanese phase with fewer consonants and vowels.
As is typical of Japonic languages, Old Japanese is primarily an agglutinative language with a subject–object–verb word order, adjectives and adverbs preceding the nouns and verbs they modify and auxiliary verbs and particles appended to the main verb. Unlike later forms of Japanese, Old Japanese adjectives can be used uninflected to modify following nouns. Old Japanese verbs have a rich system of tense and aspect suffixes.

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 seems not to have reached 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 allow them to be read as Korean.
In Japan, the practice was developed into, a complete script for the language that used Chinese characters phonetically, which 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, 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 early Old Japanese, typified by the Kojiki songs:
阿 加,迦 賀 佐 邪 多 陀 那 波 婆 麻 夜 良 和
伊 岐 芸 斯,志 士 知 遅 爾,迩 比 毘 美 理 韋
伊 紀 疑 斯,志 士 知 遅 爾,迩 斐 備 微 理 韋
宇 久 具 須 受 都 豆 奴 布 夫 牟 由 流
亜 祁 牙 勢,世 是 弖 傅 泥 弊 辨 賣 延 禮 恵
亜 気 宜 勢,世 是 弖 傅 泥 閇 倍 米 延 禮 恵
淤,意 古 胡,呉 蘇 俗,蘇 斗 度 怒 富,本 煩 毛 用 漏,路 袁,遠
淤,意 許 碁 曾 叙 登 杼 能 富,本 煩 母 余,與 呂 袁,遠

Shinkichi Hashimoto discovered in 1917 that many syllables that have a modern i, e or o occurred in two forms, termed types A and B.
These are 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.
Some authors also believe that two forms of po were distinguished in the Kojiki.
All of these pairs had merged in the Early Middle Japanese of the Heian period.
The consonants g, z, d, b and r did not occur at the start of a word.
Conversely, syllables consisting of a single vowel were restricted to word-initial position, with very few exceptions. The traditional view is that the system has gaps where yi and wu might be expected, as in later forms of Japanese. Alexander Vovin argues that the non-initial syllables i and u in words such as 'oar', 'to lie down', 'to regret', 'to age' and, the adnominal form of the verb 'to plant', should be read as Old Japanese syllables yi and wu.
-k-g-s-z-t-d-n-p-b-m-y-r-w-
-a461276163358347325552127345891645021956018318442132581
-i136795771762807035021953357101348958558183901270
-i236796904048070350219533571017561405893901270
-u1556485544425079044417106514492905389269221903656
-e14511451312202102831727142511012033186442598342
-e245101148912202102831727142595928714066442598342
-o124411995138536848526958318707577888712153657
-o2244134074361206122584888296181870757788131211773657

The rare vowel almost always occurred at the end of a morpheme.
Most occurrences of, and were also at the end of a morpheme.
The typically did not distinguish voiced from voiceless consonants, and wrote some syllables with characters that had fewer strokes and were based on older Chinese pronunciations imported via the Korean peninsula.
For example,
  • was written with the character 支, pronounced * in Old Chinese and in Middle Chinese, and
  • was written with the character 止, pronounced * in Old Chinese and in Middle Chinese.

    Transcription

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

Phonology

There is no consensus on the pronunciation of the syllables distinguished by.
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.

Consonants

Miyake reconstructed the following consonant inventory:
The voiceless obstruents had voiced prenasalized counterparts.
Prenasalization was still present 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 reflected an earlier voiceless bilabial stop *p.
There is general agreement that word-initial p had become a voiceless bilabial fricative by Early Modern 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 and has since disappeared except before a.
Many scholars, following Shinkichi Hashimoto, argue that p had already lenited to by the Old Japanese period, but Miyake argues that it was still a stop.