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. 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 (occasionally) 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.
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). 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 (), a compilation of over 4,500 poems. Shorter samples are 25 poems in the Fudoki (720) and the 21 poems of the Bussokuseki-kahi (). 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. 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 ('liturgies') recorded in the Engishiki (compiled in 927) and the 62 (literally 'announced order', meaning imperial edicts) recorded in the Shoku Nihongi (797).
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. 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. Such inscriptions became more common from the Suiko period (592–628). Those fragments are usually considered a form of Old Japanese.
Of the 10,000 paper records kept at Shōsōin, only two, dating from about 762, are in Old Japanese. Over 150,000 wooden tablets () dating from the late 7th and early 8th century have been unearthed. The tablets bear short texts, often in Old Japanese. Their language is more colloquial in style than the polished poems and liturgies of the primary corpus.
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). 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).
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 , 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 (712) and the Nihon Shoki (720).
For example, the first line of the first poem in the Kojiki was written with five characters:
Middle Chinese Old Japanese eight-cloud rise. 'many clouds rising'
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:
+ Syllables in early Old Japanese, with common man'yōgana
Shinkichi Hashimoto discovered in 1917 that many syllables that have a modern i, e or o occurred in two forms, termed types and . 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' (with conclusive ), 'to age' and , the adnominal form of the verb 'to plant', should be read as Old Japanese syllables yi and wu.
+ Frequencies of Old Japanese syllables in the Man'yōshū - 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 1995 138 536 8 485 269 583 1870 75 7788 871 215 3657 -o2 3407 436 1206 122 5848 882 9618 1312 1177
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 , pronounced * in Old Chinese and in Middle Chinese, and was written with the character , pronounced * in Old Chinese and in Middle Chinese.
Transcription Several different notations for the type A/B distinction are found in the literature, including: + Common notations for the type A/B distinction index notation i1 i2 e1 e2 o1 o2 Kindaichi, Miller, Tōdō i ï e ë o ö Vovin i ï e ɛ o ə modified Mathias–Miller î ï ê ë ô ö Yale (Martin) yi iy ye ey wo o̠ Unger, Frellesvig and Whitman i wi ye e wo o
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:
+ Old Japanese consonants Labial Dental Palatal Velar Obstruent * * * * * * * * Nasal * * Liquid * Approximant * *
The voiceless obstruents had voiced prenasalized counterparts . Prenasalization was still present in the late 17th century (according to the Korean textbook Ch'ŏphae Sinŏ) 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 the choice of kanji indicates 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.
+ Examples of reconstructions of type A/B distinctions i1 i2 e1 e2 o1 o2 Author Kikusawa (1935) Kindaichi (1938), Miller (1967) Arisaka (1955) Hattori (1958) Lange (1968, 1973) Unger (1977), Frellesvig and Whitman (2008) Ōno (1982) Miyake (2003)
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.
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 (C)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.