31. Language and Literature: The Japanese Language, Early Literature, Heian Literature.

Japanese Language

The Japanese language is spoken by the approximately 120 million inhabitants of Japan, and by the Japanese living in Hawaii and on the North and South American mainlands. It is also spoken as a second language by the Chinese and the Korean people who lived under Japanese occupation earlier this century.

Vocabulary

Three categories of words exist in Japanese. The native Japanese words constitute the largest category, followed by words originally borrowed from China in earlier history, and the smallest but a rapidly growing category of words borrowed in modern times from Western languages such as English. This third category also contains a small number of words that have come from other Asian languages. Studies by the National Language Institute show that the frequency of these three types of words varies according to the kinds of written material examined. In magazines, native Japanese words constitute more than half of the total words, while the Chinese borrowed words average about 40%, and the rest drawn from the recently borrowed words from Western languages. In newspapers, the words of Chinese origin number greater than the Japanese native words.

HISTORY OF THE JAPANESE LANGUAGE

Through painstaking research, we now have conclusive evidence for the genetic relationships of the major languages of the world. English, along with a host of languages spoken in Europe, Russia, and India, belong to the Indo-European family of languages. In contrast, there is no conclusive evidence relating Japanese to a single family of languages. The most prominent hypothesis places Japanese in the Altaic family, which includes Turkish, Tungusic, Mongolian, and Korean, with the closest relationship to Korean. According to Roy Andrew Miller, the original Altaic language was spoken in the Transcaspian steppe country, and the speakers of this language undertook massive migrations before 2,000 B.C., spreading this language family from Turkey in the west to Japan in the east. However, this hypothesis is inconsistent with some major features of Japanese, leading some scholars to turn to the languages of the South Pacific in the Austronesian family for clues of genetic relationship. A hypothesis that has currency among a number of Japanese historical linguists is a "hybrid" theory that accepts the relationship to the Altaic family, but also hypothesizes influence from Austronesian languages possibly through heavy lexical borrowing. It is also important to note that in the northern island of Hokkaido, the Ainu people, who are physically and culturally different from the rest of the Japanese, speak a language that has even more successfully escaped attempts to relate it to a single language family.

With the introduction of the writing system from China starting about 1,500 years ago, the Japanese people began to extensively record their language through poetry and prose. The language of that era, called Old Japanese, had a number of features that have been lost through time. For example, Susumu Ono has argues that Old Japanese had eight vowels instead of the five that we see today. There were also a number of grammatical and morphological features that no longer exist. The transition from Old Japanese to Modern Japanese took place from about the twelfth century, A.D., to the sixteenth century, A.D.

Regional Dialects

There are a large number of dialects throughout the four main islands and the smaller islands of Okinawa and others. Some dialects such as those spoken in the southern parts of Japan (Kyushu, Okinawa) are virtually incomprehensible to the speakers of other dialects, requiring the use of the standard (or "common") dialect for communication. The two dialect families with the largest number of speakers are the dialect spoken in and around Tokyo, which is equivalent to the "common" dialect, and the dialects of the Kansai region spoken in western Japan in cities such as Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe. Due to the spread of the common dialect through television and radio, most people outside the Tokyo region speak the common dialect as well as the dialect of their area.

Social Styles of Speech

The Japanese language employs an extensive system of politeness and honorific markers. It is often the case that in order to utter any kind of expression, the speaker must keep in mind his/her social standing to the person addressed, and the person being talked about. These markers appear on verbs, adjectives, and even nouns. For example, the informal form of the verb "to go," iku, is used when speaking with someone close to the speaker, but if the person addressed is a stranger or is older than the speaker, the politeness marker -masu appears: iki- masu. If the person being talked about is socially superior to the speaker, the honorific form of the verb "to go," irassyaru, is may be employed, even if this person is not present. In using this honorific form to talk about a socially-superior person, if the person addressed doesn't have a close relation to the speaker, such as a relative or a friend, or is older, the politeness marker appears on the honorific form: irassyai-masu. Thus, this form, irassyai-masu, simultaneously allows the speaker to be polite to the person addressed and show respect to the person being talked about. The prefix o- (go- in some contexts) may be used with nouns and adjectives to show politeness or respect to the person addressed or spoken of, as in o-tuskue (desk) and o-suki (like).

The use of pronouns varies according to social context and also often according to gender. The first person pronoun boku is used by a male in relatively informal situations, while watashi is used by a female in informal situations and by both male and female in formal situations. There are a large number of ways to expressed "you" according to social context and gender, including using the actual name of the person addressed. Aside from pronouns, the choice of some sentence-final particles varies by gender in informal speech.

The use of politeness and honorific markers and the various pronouns reflect the prominent role that in-group/out-of-group factors play in Japanese. If the person addressed is not within the "group" of the speaker in personal relationship or age, the speaker uses the polite style of speech. Familial words also reflect this. The word for your own mother is haha, but okaasan for the mother of others. We see the same bifurcation for the terms for father, sister, brother, and so forth.

Ancient literature (until 794)

Before the introduction of kanji from China, Japanese had no writing system. At first, Chinese characters were used in Japanese syntactical formats, and the result was sentences that look like Chinese but were read phonetically as Japanese. Chinese characters were further adapted, creating what is known as man'yōgana, the earliest form of kana, or syllabic writing. The earliest works were created in the Nara period. These include Kojiki (712), a work recording Japanese mythology and legendary history; Nihon Shoki (720), a chronicle with a slightly more solid foundation in historical records than Kojiki; and Man'yōshū (759), a poetry anthology. One of the stories they describe is the tale of Urashima Tarō, which has been identified as the earliest example of a story involving time travel.

Classical literature (794–1185)

Classical Japanese literature generally refers to literature produced during the Heian period, referred to as the golden era of art and literature. Genji Monogatari (early 11th century) by a woman named Murasaki Shikibu is considered the pre-eminent masterpiece of Heian fiction and an early example of a work of fiction in the form of a novel. Other important writings of this period include the Kokin Wakashū (905), a waka-poetry anthology, and Makura no Sōshi (990s), the latter written by Murasaki Shikibu's contemporary and rival, Sei Shōnagon, as an essay about the life, loves, and pastimes of nobles in the Emperor's court. The iroha poem, now one of two standard orderings for the Japanese syllabary, was also developed during the early part of this period.

The 10th century Japanese narrative, Taketori Monogatari, can be considered an early example of proto-science fiction. The protagonist of the story, Kaguya-hime, is a princess from the Moon who is sent to Earth for safety during a celestial war, and is found and raised by a bamboo cutter. She is later taken back to her extraterrestrial family in an illustrated depiction of a disc-shaped flying object similar to a flying saucer. Another notable piece of fictional Japanese literature was Konjaku Monogatarishū, a collection of over a thousand stories in 31 volumes. The volumes cover various tales from India, China and Japan. In this time, the imperial court particularly patronized the poets, most of whom were courtiers or ladies-in-waiting. Reflecting the aristocratic atmosphere, the poetry was elegant and sophisticated and expressed emotions in a rhetorical style. Editing the resulting anthologies of poetry soon became a national pastime.