A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | CH | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9
| Old Japanese | |
|---|---|
| 上代日本語 | |
 | |
| Region | Japan |
| Era | 8th century |
Japonic
| |
Early form | |
| Man'yōgana | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | ojp |
ojp [a] | |
| Glottolog | oldj1239 |
Old Japanese (上代日本語, Jōdai Nihon-go) is the oldest attested stage of the Japanese language, recorded in documents from the Nara period (8th century). It became Early Middle Japanese in the succeeding Heian period, but the precise delimitation of the stages is controversial. Old Japanese was an early member of the Japonic language family. No genetic links to other language families have been proven.
Old Japanese was written using man'yōgana, using Chinese characters as syllabograms or (occasionally) logograms. It featured a few phonemic 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 was primarily an agglutinative language with a subject–object–verb word order, adjectives and adverbs preceding the nouns and verbs they modified and auxiliary verbs and particles appended to the main verb. Unlike in later periods, Old Japanese adjectives could be used uninflected to modify following nouns. Old Japanese verbs had a rich system of tense and aspect suffixes.
Sources and dating
Old Japanese is usually defined as the language of the Nara period (710–794), when the capital was Heijō-kyō (now Nara).[1][2] That is the period of the earliest connected texts in Japanese, the 112 songs included in the Kojiki (712). The other major literary sources of the period are the 128 songs included in the Nihon Shoki (720) and the Man'yōshū (c. 759), a compilation of over 4,500 poems.[3][4] Shorter samples are 25 poems in the Fudoki (720) and the 21 poems of the Bussokuseki-kahi (c. 752). The latter has the virtue of being an original inscription, whereas the oldest surviving manuscripts of all the other texts are the results of centuries of copying, with the attendant risk of scribal errors.[5] Prose texts are more limited but are thought to reflect the syntax of Old Japanese more accurately than verse texts do. The most important are the 27 Norito ('liturgies') recorded in the Engishiki (compiled in 927) and the 62 Senmyō (literally 'announced order', meaning imperial edicts) recorded in the Shoku Nihongi (797).[4][6]
A limited number of Japanese words, mostly personal names and place names, are recorded phonetically in ancient Chinese texts, such as the "Wei Zhi" portion of the Records of the Three Kingdoms (3rd century AD), but the transcriptions by Chinese scholars are unreliable.[7] The oldest surviving inscriptions from Japan, dating from the 5th or early 6th centuries, include those on the Suda Hachiman Shrine Mirror, the Inariyama Sword, and the Eta Funayama Sword. Those inscriptions are written in Classical Chinese but contain several Japanese names that were transcribed phonetically using Chinese characters.[8][9] Such inscriptions became more common from the Suiko period (592–628).[10] Those fragments are usually considered a form of Old Japanese.[11]
Of the 10,000 paper records kept at Shōsōin, only two, dating from about 762, are in Old Japanese.[12] Over 150,000 wooden tablets (mokkan) dating from the late 7th and early 8th century have been unearthed. The tablets bear short texts, often in Old Japanese of a more colloquial style than the polished poems and liturgies of the primary corpus.[13]
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 (southwestern Korea).[14] 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 (for example, the verb being placed after the object).[15]
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 (Idu script). In Japan, the practice was developed into man'yōgana, a complete script for the language that used Chinese characters phonetically, which was the ancestor of modern kana syllabaries.[16] This system was already in use in the verse parts of the Kojiki (712) and the Nihon Shoki (720).[17][18]
For example, the first line of the first poem in the Kojiki was written with five characters:[19][20]
| 夜 | 久 | 毛 | 多 | 都 | |
| Middle Chinese[b] | yae | kjuw | maw | ta | tu |
| Old Japanese | ya-kumo1 | tatu | |||
| eight-cloud | rise.ADN | ||||
| 'many clouds rising' | |||||
This method of writing Japanese syllables by using characters for their Chinese sounds (ongana) was supplemented with indirect methods in the complex mixed script of the Man'yōshū (c. 759).[21][22][23]
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 early Old Japanese, typified by the Kojiki songs:[24][25]
| a 阿 | ka 加,迦 | ga 賀 | sa 佐 | za 邪 | ta 多 | da 陀 | na 那 | pa 波 | ba 婆 | ma 麻 | ya 夜 | ra 良 | wa 和 |
| i 伊 | ki1 岐 | gi1 芸 | si 斯,志 | zi 士 | ti 知 | di 遅 | ni 爾,迩 | pi1 比 | bi1 毘 | mi1 美 | ri 理 | wi 韋 | |
| ki2 紀 | gi2 疑 | pi2 斐 | bi2 備 | mi2 微 | |||||||||
| u 宇 | ku 久 | gu 具 | su 須 | zu 受 | tu 都 | du 豆 | nu 奴 | pu 布 | bu 夫 | mu 牟 | yu 由 | ru 流 | |
| e 亜 | ke1 祁 | ge1 牙 | se 勢,世 | ze 是 | te 弖 | de 傅 | ne 泥 | pe1 弊 | be1 辨 | me1 賣 | ye 延 | re 禮 | we 恵 |
| ke2 気 | ge2 宜 | pe2 閇 | be2 倍 | me2 米 | |||||||||
| o 淤,意 | ko1 古 | go1 胡,呉 | so1 蘇 | zo1 俗,蘇 | to1 斗 | do1 度 | no1 怒 | po 富,本 | bo 煩 | mo1 毛 | yo1 用 | ro1 漏,路 | wo 袁,遠 |
| ko2 許 | go2 碁 | so2 曾 | zo2 叙 | to2 登 | do2 杼 | no2 能 | mo2 母 | yo2 余,與 | ro2 呂 |
As in later forms of Japanese, the system has gaps where yi and wu might be expected. Shinkichi Hashimoto discovered in 1917 that many syllables that have a modern i, e or o occurred in two forms, termed types A (甲, kō) and B (乙, otsu).[24][26] 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.[27][28] Some authors also believe that two forms of po were distinguished in the Kojiki.[29] All of these pairs had merged in the Early Middle Japanese of the Heian period.[30][31]
The consonants g, z, d, b and r did not occur at the start of a word.[32] Conversely, syllables consisting of a single vowel were restricted to word-initial position, with a few exceptions such as kai 'oar', ko2i 'to lie down', kui 'to regret' (with conclusive kuyu), oi 'to age' and uuru, the adnominal form of the verb uwe 'to plant'.[33][34] Alexander Vovin argues that the non-initial syllables i and u in these cases should be read as Old Japanese syllables yi and wu.[35]
| - | k- | g- | s- | z- | t- | d- | n- | p- | b- | m- | y- | r- | w- | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| -a | 4612 | 7616 | 3358 | 3473 | 255 | 5212 | 734 | 5891 | 6450 | 2195 | 6018 | 3184 | 4213 | 2581 |
| -i1 | 3679 | 5771 | 762 | 8070 | 350 | 2195 | 335 | 7101 | 3489 | 585 | 5818 | 3901 | 270 | |
| -i2 | 690 | 404 | 756 | 140 | 589 | |||||||||
| -u | 1556 | 4855 | 444 | 2507 | 904 | 4417 | 1065 | 1449 | 2905 | 389 | 2692 | 2190 | 3656 | |
| -e1 | 45 | 1145 | 13 | 1220 | 210 | 2831 | 727 | 1425 | 1101 | 203 | 318 | 644 | 2598 | 342 |
| -e2 | 1011 | 489 | 959 | 287 | 1406 | |||||||||
| -o1 | 2441 | Zdroj:https://en.wikipedia.org?pojem=Old_Japanese_language