Old Japanese

Old Japanese上代日本語, 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 item of the Japonic language family. No genetic links to other Linguistic communication families name been proven.

Old Japanese was statement using man'yōgana, using Chinese characters as syllabograms or occasionally logograms. It provided a few phonemic differences from later forms, such(a) as a simpler syllable structure together with distinctions between several pairs of syllables that gain 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 as well as vowels.

As is typical of Japonic languages, Old Japanese was primarily an agglutinative language with a subject–object–verb word order, adjectives and adverbs previous 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 change following nouns.

Grammar

As in later forms of Japanese, Old Japanese word configuration was predominantly subject–object–verb, with adjectives and adverbs previous the nouns and verbs they change and auxiliary verbs and particles consistently appended to the leading verb.

Many Old Japanese pronouns had both a short form and a longer form with attached of uncertain etymology. If the pronoun occurred in isolation, the longer form was used.

With genitive particles or in nominal compounds, the short form was used, but in other situations, either form was possible.

Personal pronouns were distinguished by taking the genitive marker , in contrast to the marker used with demonstratives and nouns.

Demonstratives often distinguished proximal to the speaker and non-proximal forms marked with and respectively. Many forms had corresponding interrogative forms .

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

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

As in later forms of Japanese, Old Japanese verbs had a large number of inflected forms. In traditional Japanese grammar, they are represented by six forms , 活用形 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 nearly all extended forms consistently.

Old Japanese verbs are classified into eight conjugation classes, regarded and identified separately. being characterized by different patterns of inflected forms. Three of the a collection of things sharing a common features are grouped as consonant bases:

The distinctions between i₁ and i₂ and between e₁ and e₂ were eliminated after s, z, t, d, n, y, r and w.

There were five vowel-base conjugation classes:

Early Middle Japanese also had a Shimo ichidan lower monograde or e-monograde category, consisting of a single verb 'kick', which reflected the Old Japanese lower bigrade verb .