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,

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.

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. The issue is hotly debated, and there is no consensus. The 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 about 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.
The distribution of syllables suggests that 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 as evidence that Co1 may have represented Cwo.

Accent

Although modern Japanese dialects have pitch-accent systems, pitch distinctions were usually not shown in. However, in one part of the Nihon Shoki, the Chinese characters appeared to have been chosen to represent pitch patterns similar to those 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. A similar division was used in the tone patterns of Chinese poetry, which were emulated by Japanese poets in the late Asuka period. Thus, it appears that the Old Japanese accent system was similar to that of Early Middle Japanese.

Phonotactics

Old Japanese words consisted of one or more open syllables of the form V, subject to additional restrictions:
  • Words did not begin with r or the voiced obstruents b, d, z, and g, with the exception of a few loanwords.
  • A bare vowel did not occur except for word-initially: vowel sequences were not permitted.
In 1934, Hideyo Arisaka 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.

Morphophonemics

Two adjacent vowels fused to form a new vowel when a consonant was lost within a morpheme, or a compound was lexicalized as a single morpheme.
The following fusions occurred:
;i1 + a → e1
;i1 + o2 → e1
;a + i → e2
;o2 + i → e2
;o2 + i → i2
;u + i → i2
;u + a → o1
;u + o → o1
Adjacent vowels belonging to different morphemes, or pairs of vowels for which none of the above fusions applied, were reduced by deleting one or other of the vowels.
Most often, the first of the adjacent vowels was deleted:
  • 'eternal' + 'rock' → 'eternal rock; everlasting'
  • 'heaven' + 'descend' → 'descend from heaven'
The exception to this rule occurred when the first of the adjacent vowels was the sole vowel of a monosyllabic morpheme, in which case the other vowel was deleted:
  • + 'horse' → 'honourable horse'
  • 'child, egg' + 'birth' → 'give birth, lay an egg'
Cases where both outcomes are found are attributed to different analyses of morpheme boundaries:
  • 'my' + 'house' → 'my house'
  • 'I' + + 'house' → 'my house'

Pre-Old Japanese

Internal reconstruction suggests that the stage preceding Old Japanese had fewer consonants and vowels.

Consonants

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:b < *-mVp-, *-nVp-: e.g. 'net' + 'pull' → 'trawling'd < *-mVt-, *-nVt-: e.g. 'mountain' + 'path' → 'mountain path'z < *-mVs-, *-nVs-: e.g. 'village' + 'master' → g < *-mVk-, *-nVk-
In some cases, such as 'grain', 'rudder' and 'knee', 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:
  • 'I' and 'stomach' corresponding to Old Japanese and
  • Yonaguni 'house', 'hot water' and 'mountain' corresponding to Old Japanese, and
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.

Vowels

As seen in, many occurrences of the rare vowels i2, e1, e2 and o1 arise from fusion of more common vowels.
Similarly, many nouns having independent forms ending in -i2 or -e2 also have bound forms ending in a different vowel, which are believed to be older.
For example, 'rice wine' has the form in compounds such as 'sake cup'.
The following alternations are the most common:i2/''u-: / 'god, spirit', / 'body', / 'a calm'. / 'moon', / 'stalk'.i2/o2-: / 'tree', / 'Hades',e2/a-: / 'eye', / 'heaven', / 'rain', / 'shade', / 'day, sun', / 'nail, hoof', / 'bamboo'.
The widely accepted analysis of this situation is that the most common Old Japanese vowels a'', u, i1 and o2 reflect earlier *a, *u, *i and *ə respectively, and the other vowels reflect fusions of these vowels:i2 < *ui, *əie1 < *ia, *iəe2 < *aio1 < *ua, *uə
Thus the above independent forms of nouns can be derived from the bound form and a suffix *-i.
The origin of this suffix is debated, with one proposal being the ancestor of the obsolescent particle, and another being a weakened consonant.
There are also alternations suggesting e2 < *əi, such as / 'back' and / 'bud'.
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 instances of word-final e1 and o1 are difficult to analyse as fusions, and some authors postulate *e and *o to account for such cases.
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 and in some modern Japanese dialects.

Morphology

Old Japanese nominals tend to have simple morphology and little fusion, in contrast to the complex inflectional morphology of verbs.
Japanese at all stages has used prefixes with both nouns and verbs, but Old Japanese also used prefixes for grammatical functions later expressed using suffixes.
This is atypical of SOV languages, and may suggest that the language was in the final stage of a transition from a SVO typology.

Nominals

Pronouns

Old Japanese include personal pronouns, demonstratives and an isolated interrogative pronoun 'what'.
Many pronouns have both a short form and a longer form with attached of uncertain etymology.
If the pronoun occurs in isolation, the longer form is used.
The short form is used with genitive particles or in nominal compounds, but in other situations either form is possible.
Personal pronouns are distinguished by taking the genitive marker, in contrast to the marker used with demonstratives and nouns.
Demonstratives often distinguish proximal and non-proximal forms marked with and respectively.
Many forms have corresponding interrogative forms.
ProximalNon-proximalInterrogative
Nominal
Location
Direction
Degree
Manner–
Manner
Time––

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

Numerals

In later texts, such as the Man'yōshū, numerals are sometimes written using Chinese logographs, which give no indication of pronunciation.
The following numerals are attested phonographically:
1 10 100 1000 10,000
2 20
3 30
4 40
5 50 500
6
7 70
8 80 800
9

The forms for 50 and 70 are known only from Heian texts.
There is a single example of a phonographically recorded compound number, in Bussokuseki 2:
This example uses the classifiers and .
The only attested ordinal numeral is 'first'.
In Classical Japanese, the other ordinal numerals have the same form as cardinals. This may also have been the case for Old Japanese, but there are no textual occurrences to settle the question.

Classifiers

The classifier system of Old Japanese is much less developed than at later stages of the language, and classifiers are not obligatory between numerals and nouns.
A few bound forms are attested phonographically:,,,, and .
Many ordinary nouns can also be used either freely or as classifiers.

Prefixes

Old Japanese nominal prefixes include honorific, intensive from 'truth', diminutive or affectionate and a prefix of uncertain function.

Suffixes

Old Japanese nominals have suffixes or particles to mark diminutives, plural number and case.
When multiple suffixes occur, case markers come last. Unmarked nouns are neutral as to number.
The main plural markers are the general-purpose and two markers restricted to animate nouns, and.
The main case particles are
The subject of a sentence is usually not marked.
There are a few cases in the Senmyō of subjects of active verbs marked with a suffix, which is thought to be an archaism that was obsolete in the Old Japanese period.

Verbs

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

Inflected forms

As in later forms of Japanese, Old Japanese verbs have 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

Old Japanese verbs are classified into eight conjugation classes that were originally defined for the classical Japanese of the late Heian period. In each class, the inflected forms showed a different pattern of rows of a kana table.
These rows correspond to the five vowels of later Japanese, but the discovery of the A/B distinction in Old Japanese showed a more refined picture.
Three of the classes are grouped as consonant bases:
;
;
;
Verb classIrrealisInfinitiveConclusiveAdnominalExclamatoryImperativeGloss
quadrigrade'write'
n-irregular'die'
r-irregular'be, exist'

The distinctions between i1 and i2 and between e1 and e2 are eliminated after s, z, t, d, n, y, r and w.
There are five vowel-base conjugation classes:
;
;
;
;
;
Early Middle Japanese also has a category, consisting of a single verb 'kick', which reflects the Old Japanese lower bigrade verb.
Verb classIrrealisInfinitiveConclusiveAdnominalExclamatoryImperativeGloss
e-bigrade'open'
i-bigrade'arise'
monograde'see'
k-irregular'come'
s-irregular'do'

The bigrade verbs seem to belong to a later layer than other verbs.
Many e-bigrade verbs are transitive or intransitive counterparts of consonant-base 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:
  • *-a-i > -e2, e.g. 'redden, lighten' vs 'red'.
  • *-u-i > -i2, e.g. 'get desolate, fade' vs 'lonely'.
  • *-ə-i > -i2, e.g. 'get big, grow' vs 'big'.

Copulas

Old Japanese has two copulas with limited and irregular conjugations:
InfinitiveAdnominalGerund

The form had a limited distribution in Old Japanese, and disappeared in Early Middle Japanese. In later Japanese, the form became, but these forms have otherwise endured to modern Japanese.

Verbal prefixes

Japanese has used verbal prefixes conveying emphasis at all stages, but Old Japanese also has prefixes expressing grammatical functions, such as reciprocal or cooperative, stative, potential and prohibitive, which is often combined with a suffix.

Verbal auxiliaries

Old Japanese has a rich system of auxiliary elements that can be suffixed to verb stems and are themselves inflected, usually following the regular consonant-stem or vowel-stem paradigms, but never including the full range of forms found with full verbs.
Many of these disappeared in later stages of the language.
Tense and aspect are indicated by suffixes attached to the infinitive.
The tense suffixes are:
  • the simple past,, . The variation may indicate an origin in multiple forms. Indeed counterparts of are absent from Ryukyuan and weakly attested in Eastern Old Japanese.
  • the modal past or retrospective, a fusion of the simple past with 'exist'.
  • the past conjectural, a fusion of the simple past with the conjectural suffix.
The perfective suffixes are and.
During the Late Middle Japanese period, the tense and aspect suffixes were replaced with a single past-tense suffix, derived from + 'exist' >.
However, the Hachijō language retains some of the early tense and aspect system, in particular reflexes of the old past suffix and the distinction between and forms.
Other auxiliaries are attached to the irrealis stem:
  • the negative and < *
  • the passive and
  • the causative
  • the honorific
  • the iterative or
  • the conjectural or tentative
  • the subjunctive
The honorific and iterative ceased to be productive in Middle Japanese.
During the Early Middle Japanese period, the causative was replaced by.

Adjectives

Old Japanese adjectives were originally nominals and, unlike in later periods, can be used uninflected to modify following nouns.
They can also take a suffix, forming stative verbs conjugated in two classes:
ClassStemInfinitiveConclusiveAdnominalExclamatoryGloss
'hard'
'precious'

The second class, with stems ending in, differs only in the conclusive form, whose suffix was dropped by haplology.
Adjectives of this class tend to express more subjective qualities.
Many of them were formed from a verbal stem by the addition of a suffix of uncertain origin.
Towards the end of the Old Japanese period, a more expressive conjugation was formed by adding the verb 'be' to the infinitive, with the sequence reducing to :
IrrealisInfinitiveAdnominalGloss
'hard'

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

Syntax

As in later forms of Japanese, Old Japanese word order is 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.
Questions, exclamations and prohibitives are marked using particles, either in the middle of the sentence or at the end, while imperatives are marked by conjugating the verb.

Focus construction

Old Japanese makes extensive use of a focus construction, known as, to express emphasis and questions. A focus particle marks a copular relation between the constituent preceding the particle and a predicate in the adnominal form, instead of the conclusive form usually found in declarative sentences.
The marked constituent is also typically fronted in comparison with its position in a corresponding declarative sentence.
The semantic effect is often similar to a cleft sentence in English:
The particles involved are
  • , marking the focus of a yes–no question. The particle can also be used as a sentence-final marker of a yes–no question, in which case the verb is in the usual conclusive form.
  • , marking the phrase containing the interrogative word of an open question or the focus of a yes–no question.
  • ~, the usual declarative focus marker. By Early Middle Japanese, this had standardized as.
  • , soliciting agreement, is rare in poetry but occurs in some prose works. By Early Middle Japanese, it had become.
  • , marking a more emphatic focus. In Early Middle Japanese, this particle occurs with a verb in the exclamatory form.
The focus construction is also common in Classical Japanese, but disappeared after the Early Middle Japanese period.
It is still found in Ryukyuan languages, but is much less common there than in Old Japanese.

Nominalization

The nominal form of a verb, marked with, forms a nominalized clause.
The following example has a nominal clause within an adverbial clause marked with the infinitive form:
The nominal was heavily used in Old Japanese, both with verbs and adjectives, but ceased to be productive in Early Middle Japanese, when its function was taken over by the adnominal.

Dialects

Although most Old Japanese writing represents the language of the Nara court in central Japan, some sources come from eastern Japan:
  • 230 'eastern songs', making up volume 14 of the Man'yōshū,
  • 93 'borderguard songs' in volume 20 of the Man'yōshū, and
  • 9 songs in the Hitachi Fudoki.
They record Eastern Old Japanese dialects, with several differences from central Old Japanese :
  • There is no type A/B distinction on front vowels i and e, but o1 and o2 are distinguished.
  • Pre-Old Japanese *ia yielded a in the east, where central Old Japanese has e1.
  • The adnominal form of consonant-base verbs ended in, whereas central Old Japanese had for both the adnominal and the conclusive forms. The modern Hachijō language distinguishes -o and -u in these forms. A similar difference is preserved in Ryukyuan languages, suggesting that central Old Japanese had innovated by merging those endings.
  • The adnominal form of adjectives had in place of central Old Japanese. This form is also preserved in Hachijō.
  • The imperative form of vowel-base verbs attached, instead of the used in central Old Japanese. This difference has persisted into modern eastern and western dialects.
  • There was a group of distinctive negative auxiliaries and, but they do not seem to be the source of the different negatives in the modern eastern and western Japanese dialects.
  • There are a significant number of words borrowed from Ainu.

Works cited

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