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 The Tale of Genji, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, and The [Tales of Ise].

Writing system

Early Middle Japanese was written in three different ways. It was first recorded in Man'yōgana, literally "ten thousand leaves borrowed labels", in reference to the Man'yōshū poetry anthology and the "borrowing" of the kanji characters as "labels" for the sounds of Japanese. Certain Chinese characters were borrowed to phonetically spell out Japanese sounds. Cursive handwriting gradually gave rise to the hiragana and Buddhist shorthand practices of using pieces of kanji to denote the sounds then developed into the katakana.
It is worth noting that the man'yōgana in each cell only indicates one of many contemporary options for spelling each Japanese mora – in the table above, each chosen character is the direct origin of the corresponding modern hiragana. See also Hentaigana for a fuller description of how multiple hiragana could be used to spell a single sound. Also note that hiragana forms were not standardized at that time.
Although man'yōgana specify different kanji to represent voiced phonemes versus unvoiced phonemes, it is not until the Meiji period that we see standardized usage of the dakuten diacritic ゛ to explicitly mark voicing for hiragana and katakana.
Japan officially adopted simplified shinjitai in 1946 as part of a round of orthographic reforms intended to improve literacy rates. The so-called kyūjitai are equivalent to Chinese characters">Chinese language">Chinese characters, and these forms were the ones used in historical man'yōgana. Modern transcriptions of classical texts are predominantly written in shinjitai. To avoid unnecessary ambiguity, quotes from classical texts would be written in kyūjitai.
Additionally, there are many spelling differences between Modern Japanese and Early Middle Japanese even for the same word. For example, 万葉集 is spelled in modern Japanese hiragana as まんようしゅう, while in Early Middle Japanese, this would have been まんえふしふ. Details on these spelling rules are helpful for understanding historical kana usage.

Phonology

Developments

Major phonological changes were characteristic of the period.
The most prominent difference was the loss of certain spelling distinctions found in the Jōdai Tokushu Kanazukai, which distinguished two types of,, and. While these distinctions had begun to blur already at the end of the Old Japanese stage, they were completely lost in Early Middle Japanese. The final distinction to be lost was /ko₁, go₁/ vs. /ko₂, go₂/. For example, around the year 800 in very early Early Middle Japanese, in the same text /ko₁/ was still represented by cursive 「古」, while /ko₂/ was represented by cursive 「己」.
In the 10th century, and progressively merged into, and and had merged into /wo/ by the 11th century.
An increase in Chinese loanwords had a number of phonological effects:

Introduction of palatal and labial consonant clusters such as /kw/ and /kj/
Introduction of the uvular nasal
Length becoming a phonemic feature with the development of both long vowels and long consonants

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, as in Modern Japanese.

=By the 11th century, had merged with between vowels.

Grammar

Syntactically, Early Middle Japanese was a subject-object-verb language with a topic-comment structure. Morphologically, it was an agglutinative language.

Phrase

A paragraph of Early Middle Japanese can be divided into the following units from large to small.Sentence ：A series of meaningful words divided from a paragraph by 「。」.Phrase : The smallest unit naturally divided from the rest of a sentence by its meaning.Word : The smallest grammatical unit.

Classes of words

Words were classified as follows:

stand alone as a phrase
* particle : inflection. Has various functions like emphasis, acting like a postposition, hinting about the subject or expressing interrogative mood.
* Auxiliary verb : inflection. Describes additional information of Yougen like tense, aspect, mood, voice, and polarity. Alternate descriptions include grammaticalized verb or Verb-like ending.
stand alone as phrase
* inflection
** be subject
*** Adverb: mainly modifies Yougen.
*** Conjunction
*** Interjection '''
*** Rentaisi : mainly modifies Taigen.
** be subject: Taigen
*** Noun
*** Pronoun
*** Number
* inflection: Yougen
** Verb
** Adjective : actually the stative verbs.
** Adjective verb : a different kind of "adjective", which is derived from a noun. Hence also referred to as adjectival noun in English.

Auxiliary particle

Particles had various functions, and they can be classified as follows:

Class of particle	Functions	Example
Case particles	indicating the relationship between a phrase and its following phrase.	いづ which direction of escape has gone ?
Conjunctive particles	indicating the relationship between clauses.	「文を書きてやれ」, 「返り事もせず」.
Adverbial particles	mainly modifying its following yougen.	ただ浪の ...can only see white wave
Binding particles	emphasizing its phrase or making it interrogative, and limiting the inflection form of the ending yougen or auxiliary verb.	いづ In direction of escape has gone
Final particles	mainly at the end of sentence, indicating many kinds of moods	At that time I'm definitely not good
Interjectory particles	similar to final particle, but occurs more freely, and is often used as a short stop between sentences.	Ason At least pick these kinds of falling leaves up!

Case particle

「が」 ' and 「の」 : "of,...'s". It hints the present of subject, relation of modification between phrases or nouns.
「を」'. Optional.
「に」'. It had a wide range of functions, and in some uses, especially when indicating time, it was optional.
「より」.
「まで」'.
「と」.
「へ」. 「へ」 was derived from the noun「」'vicinity; direction', which 「わ」 occasionally found in the location noun structure Noun + 「の」 + Location Noun to mean 'near', or in the noun-deriving suffix 「べ」 in such words as 'beside the water'.

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 was 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.

Conjunctive particle

Infinitive + 「て」: 'and, when, because'. It usually expressed a close sequential link between the predicates that it connects. The subjects of the two verbs connected by「て」 were usually the same.
Realis + 「ば」: 'and, when, because'. It usually expressed a looser sequential link between the predicates that it connected. The subject of both verbs connected by 「ば」 was usually different.
Irrealis + 「ば」: 'if...', It usually expressed an unreal condition.
Irrealis + 「で」: negative 'and', 'without... ing', 'rather than... ', derived from old infinitive of negative auxiliary verb「ず」 + the particle 「て」with sound change.
Various forms + 「と/とも」 ': 'even if, even though'. Most yougens and auxiliary verbs took the conclusive form, bigrade verbs take the infinitive in earlier texts, r-irregular verbs took the attributive form, and some auxiliary verbs inflecting like adjective and negative auxiliary verbs「ず」also took the attributive.
Infinitive + 「つつ」 : 'while '.
Infinitive of verb / stem of adjective + 「ながら」': 'while, while still' or 'despite'.

Binding particle

There were some special particles that limited the inflectional form of the yougen and auxiliary verb at the end of a sentence. These particles are called binding particles. These limitations are called binding rules.

Binding particle	Meaning	Ending form	Example
ぞ	emphasis on its phrase		ふるさとは花のにひ In hometown, the flowers smell like the scent of the past of「けり」
なむ	emphasis on its phrase		その竹の中に、もと光るあり Among these bamboos, there one bamboo was shining at root. of「けり」
や	question, or rhetorical question		花と聞きわかむ　 I listen and try to realize. Is spring too or the flower too of adjectives「し」 and「し」
か	question, or rhetorical question		生きとし生けるもの　いづれ歌をまざり　 living beings, who doesn't write a poem of「けり」
こそ	strong emphasis on its phrase		男はこの女をと思ふ　 the man thought he get girl. of modal auxiliary verb「む」

Note that the case particle「と」indicates a preceding quote, and a quote should be considered as an independent sentence when applying the binding rule.
Susumu Ōno assumed that these binding particles were originally final particles. For example:

Man'yōgana: 苦毛零來雨
Modern transliteration:
Translation: How miserable! it starts to rain!

Notice that 「来る」 is attributive. According to his assumption, if we want to emphasize the noun 「雨」, we can invert the whole sentence as the following:

雨

Obviously, this gives birth to the binding rule. Since other binding particles can also be considered as final particles in Old Japanese, this assumption is reasonable.

Verbs

Early Middle Japanese verb inflection was agglutinative. Most verbs were conjugated in 6 forms and could be combined with auxiliary verbs to express tense, aspect, mood, voice, and polarity. Several of the auxiliary verbs could be combined in a string, and each component determined the choice of form of the preceding component.
In Japanese there are many different yougens with the same pronunciation, or the same yougen has various meanings. To distinguish, modern transliteration uses Kanji to highlight these differences. For example, the lower bigrade verbs「」means "get used to", but its also means "become familiar" which is represented by「」. Meanwhile, the quadrigrade verb「」has the same pronunciation with 「」but it actually means "become".

Conjugation

Early Middle Japanese inherited all eight verbal conjugations class from Old Japanese and added new one: Lower Monograde, but there's only 「」 classified as Lower Monograde in Early Middle Japanese.
Early Middle Japanese Verbs were divided into 5 class of regular conjugations:
Quadrigrade, Upper monograde, Lower monograde, Upper bigrade, Lower bigrade.
There were also 4 "irregular" conjugations:
K-irregular, S-irregular, N-irregular, R-irregular.
The conjugation of each is divided into 6 Inflectional forms:

Irrealis
Infinitive
Conclusive
Attributive
Realis
Imperative

The English names for the irrealis and the realis differ from author to author, including negative and evidential, or imperfective and perfective.
In following table, red part means, while blue part means.

Inflectional form = +
= root consonant + real suffix

*Noted that most S-irregular is the combination of a noun and 「」, for example, 「」 is a combination of the noun 「」 and 「」.
The 「」 at the end of the imperative forms is optional, although exceedingly common.
The system of 9 conjugation classes appears to be complex. However, all nine conjugations can be subsumed into variations of two groups:

the consonant-root verbs
the vowel-root 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 '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. 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 some questions about this arrangement of forms:

The irrealis is not used as an independent verb form: it must be followed by an auxiliary.
: That said, there is a limited set of nouns appearing in Old Japanese and ending in -a, that appear to overlap phonetically and semantically with the irrealis form of certain verbs. These could be analyzed as resultative deverbal nouns.
The classical passive auxiliary verb 「る」 attaches to the irrealis stem an -a ending, while the other classical passive auxiliary 「らる」 attaches to the irrealis stem an -a ending. This raises the assumption that this -a ending appears to be part of the auxiliary verb, but not part of the verb conjugation stem. According to this assumption, some scholars like Nicolas Tranter argue that the irrealis does not exist, per se, interpreting this instead as a more primitive "stem" plus an -a element that is the start of a following word. However, this rejection of the irrealis cannot explain the attested forms seen where the irrealis stem ending in -a is followed by the conditional particle 「ば」, expressing an unreal condition in classical Japanese. In actuality, the Japanese term 「未然形」, while often translated as "irrealis", literally means "imperfect form", and it is named after this kind of usage. Additionally, the rejection cannot explain the modal auxiliary verb 「む」, which also attaches to the irrealis. Various examples:
The infinitive had two functions: a linking function with another yougen or auxiliary verb, and a nominal function as a deverbal noun, but these two functions have different pitch patterns.
Generally, The yougen or auxiliary verb occurred before conjunction particle 「とも」 in the conclusive form, but in some instances in Old Japanese poetry, the upper monograde verb 「」 appears in the infinitive form instead before「とも」:

Man'yōgana: 之婆之婆等母安加無伎禰加毛

Modern transliteration: しばしば

It is possible that the monograde verb infinitive form mi above that was used before 「とも」 was the earlier true conclusive form. Alternatively, the form above may have been an instance of poetic contraction to limit the number of morae on the line to the expected seven.

Additionally, before auxiliary verb 「べし」, any yougen should generally use the conclusive, while R-irregular verbs use the attributive instead. With endings such as 「べし」, there is strong evidence that this word was originally the adverb 「」, and thus the observed combination of aru beshi is probably a fusion of the root ar- of the verb with the initial u sound of the auxiliary — suggesting that, in 「あるべし」, when we would expect ari beshi, the apparently anomalous u was actually part of the following word, and not part of the verb form.

Auxiliary verbs

Auxiliary verbs are attached to the various forms of yougen, and a yougen could be followed by several such endings in a string. Auxiliary verbs are classified into many inflectional class like verbs.
Generally, to learn how to use an Auxiliary verb, we need to know its inflection, required forms of its preceding word, and various function. The following is a detail example about 「る」and 「らる」.
「る」 requires to be preceded by irrealis '''-a ending, while 「らる」requires irrealis -a ending.
They have 4 different functions.
Representing passive mood:

translation: thing that despised people
Representing slight respect to someone :
母の
translation: the thing that make the mother sad

Expressing possibility or potential.

translation: bow and arrow shoot.

Representing a spontaneous voice.

translation: the sound of wind me startled.

Rough classification

Voice: 'passive' and 'causative':

Consonant-stem verbs + 「る」, vowel-stem verbs + 「らる」 : passive voice; spontaneous voice ; honorific; potential.
Consonant-stem verbs + 「す」, vowel-stem verbs + 「さす」 : causative; honorific.
Any verb + 「しむ」 : causative; honorific. It often occurs in Kanbun.

Tense/Aspect:

Irrealis +「り」 : progressive or perfect aspect. Only attached to quadrigrade or S-irregular verbs.
Infinitive + 「たり」 : progressive or perfect aspect. Attached to any verbs.
Infinitive + 「ぬ」 : perfective aspect.
Infinitive + 「つ」 : perfective aspect.
Infinitive + 「き」: witnessed past tense.
Infinitive + 「けり」 : unwitnessed past tense, or emotive assertion.
Irrealis + 「まし」 : counterfactual. The combination 「ましかば」 expresses a counterfactual condition.

Mood:

「む」 : tentative mood, expressing among other functions uncertainty, intention, and hortative.
「べし」 : debitive mood, expressing 'can', 'should', or 'must'.
「なり」 : hearsay mood.

Polarity:

「ず」: negative.
「じ」 : negative of the tentative mood.
「まじ」: negative of the dubitative mood.

Adjectives

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 「-く」 and those that ended in 「-しく」.
Class of
inflection subclass stem
語幹 Irrealis
未然形 Adverbial
連用形 Conclusive
終止形 Attributive
連体形 Realis
已然形 Imperative
命令形 meaning
-ku
ク活用
本活用 'be high'
-ku
ク活用
カリ活用 'be high'
-siku
シク活用
本活用 'be beautiful'
-siku
シク活用
カリ活用 'be beautiful'

The class of siku-adjectives included a few adjectives that had 「-じ」, rather than 「-し」:
Class of
inflection subclass stem
語幹 Irrealis
未然形 Adverbial
連用形 Conclusive
終止形 Attributive
連体形 Realis
已然形 Imperative
命令形 meaning
-siku
シク活用 main
本活用 -じく -じ -じき -じけれ 'be the same'
-siku
シク活用 kari
カリ活用 -じから -じかり -じかり -じかる -じかれ -じかれ 'be the same'
They usually had 「-じ」 rather than 「-じき」 in its attributive form.
The -kar- and -sikar- forms were derived from the verb 「wikt:有り」"be, exists.":

Man'yōgana: 可奈之家牟
Modern transliteration:

Since the auxiliary verb of pass tentative mood「けむ」needs to be preceded by infinitive, 「あり」is in infinitive form. And then naturally, the adjective 「」links to 「あり」 by infinitive. In Man'yōshū there's also example of 「-」.

Man'yōgana: 加奈之家理
Modern transliteration:

Since the auxiliary verb of unwitnessed past「けり」needs to be preceded by infinitive, 「」is in infinitive form.
So it's reasonable to assume that the infinitive suffix「-」is derived from 「-」that had lost its initial u-sound. There's also similar example about other forms in Man'yōshū.
From above paragraph, we can realize that kari inflection is generally used to link to an auxiliary verbs, but there's an example to show that the imperative form of kari inflection is an exception of this rule:
はげし
That is, the imperative form of kari inflection 'is independently used without linking to any auxiliary verb.'''

Adjectival noun

*The Japanese term 悄然 is a borrowing from Middle Chinese word 悄然 with reconstructed pronunciation, meaning ‘quietly, softly’. Like 悄然, most tari adjectives are derived from Chinese borrowings.
The nari and tari inflections shared a similar etymology. The nari form was a contraction of the adverbial particle「に」and the -r irregular verb「」"be, exist": に + あり → なり, while the tari inflection was a contraction of the adverbial particle と and : と + あり → たり.

Yougen in auxiliary form

「」 : progressive aspect. 'sit; live; be'.
「」 : progressive aspect. 'continue,...ing'.
「」 : preparative aspect, expressing an action performed in readiness for some future action. 'put'.
「」: speculative aspect, expressing an action performed experimentally, to 'see' what it is like. 'see'.

Class of inflection	subclass	stem 語幹	Irrealis 未然形	Adverbial 連用形	Conclusive 終止形	Attributive 連体形	Realis 已然形	Imperative 命令形	meaning
-ku ク活用	本活用								'be high'
-ku ク活用	カリ活用								'be high'
-siku シク活用	本活用								'be beautiful'
-siku シク活用	カリ活用								'be beautiful'