Japanese language
Photo © by Sonny Santos, used by permission.
Japanese (日本語, Nihongo), the main language of Japan and the native tongue of at least 127 million people, is notable for: a complex system of honorific language which allows speakers to express and indicate their social status relative to one another; a writing system which uniquely employs a combination of three or four different scripts for different purposes; its disputed relatedness to other languages around the world; and a sound structure known as pitch accent in which the pitch of the voice alone may distinguish different words. Nowadays spoken by emigrant communities worldwide, but only widely standardised in the last century or so, Japanese is also a set of highly divergent dialects spoken across the Japanese archipelago which often bear scant resemblance to one another; likewise, the other Japonic languages of which it forms one branch are also highly distinct. Japanese literature goes back to the eighth century, while today the language continues to absorb large amounts of loanwords, previously from Chinese and today more commonly from English.
Grammatically, Japanese is an agglutinative language - grammatical units link together in long 'strings' to make words. For example, 食べたくなかった tabetakunakatta[1] 'did not want to eat' is composed of the morphemes tabe- 'eat', -ta- 'want', -ku- 'adverb',[2] -na- 'negative', and -kat- and -ta - both signifying that the action is complete, i.e. in the past.[3] Phonologically, its 'sounds' consist mainly of consonant-vowel units that cannot be split up, such as bu, ni and ka, which are written as single symbols, in these cases ぶ, に and か in hiragana and ブ, ニ and カ in katakana.
Writing system
Japanese is written using a combination of three different scripts. Chinese-derived characters (漢字 kanji) are used for the most meaningful words such as most nouns and verbs; these take some time to learn. Two further kana scripts, hiragana (ひらがな) and katakana (カタカナ) write moras, equivalent to but not the same as syllables, and to a degree can indicate pronunciation. The Roman alphabet, roomaji (ローマ字), is also often used in modern Japanese. Numbers are usually written with Arabic numerals, as in many countries, but kanji are also used, especially in traditional contexts.
Kanji are not the same system as the Chinese characters used to write languages such as Mandarin today; rather, the Japanese took the characters and reworked them to suit the quite different grammar of their own language. The kana systems were devised by simplifying the strokes of characters, and used to indicate pronunciation rather than incorporating an idea of the meaning as well. Over the centuries, these systems, which early on were often used alone (e.g. men using kanji and women writing exclusively in kana), merged into the present system. For example, all or part of the root of a verb will typically be rendered with a character, while word endings are written in kana: 飲む nomu '[to] drink', for example, has the root nom- written as a kanji 飲 [no] and part of the hiragana symbol む [mɯ]. Morphological boundaries, then, do not always align with symbols.
Footnotes
- ↑ Tabetakunakatta can be followed by です desu, which is the copula verb equivalent to 'be'. Tabetakunakatta, then, is not really a verb in the same way the 'eat' is a verb in English, in that it behaves somewhat like an adjective in Japanese. Indeed, Japanese groups adjectives into two, -i and na types, in which the former group morphologically behave as verbs while the latter act as adjectives in a more similar way to those of English.
- ↑ -ku- acts to convert adjectives to adverbs, e.g. 高く takaku 'expensively'; however, in this case, -ku- is followed by the suffixes -na-, -kat- and -ta, which indicate it is verb-like negative adjective.
- ↑ Japanese indicates whether an action is complete or incomplete, rather than the past versus non-past distinction of English. -ta is the form used for verbs as well as adjectives, while -kat- must be included in -i adjectives marked for completion.