Chinese impacts on the Japanese language
Shibatani Masayoshi
Due to the historical accident that the Japanese decided
to absorb Chinese culture and adopt Chinese characters as a means
to represent their language, colloquial speech and the written
language took different paths of development, though some genres of
writing were much closer to the colloquial speech of the time than
others. The divergence between the colloquial form and the written
form originates in the development of the written style called
Sinico-Japanese (or kanbun) tradition.
Sinico-Japanese developed as a response to the desire to write
Japanese in Chinese characters and in Chinese syntax! Such a desire
was strongly felt during the Heian period (800‒1186), when the
influence of Chinese culture was at its peak. Much as Latin was
cherished in the medieval world of scholarship in the West, Chinese
letters were both a symbol of learning and a means of recording
official matters.
However, as Japanese and Chinese
happened to be radically different in syntax, writing Japanese in
Chinese and reading the resulting texts in the Japanese style
involved a number of complications. Writing was perhaps more like
translating Japanese sentences into Chinese, but reading the
resulting text as a Japanese text required not only inversion in
word order but also the supplying of inflectional endings and
particles that were foreign to the Chinese language. It is from
this cumbersome way of writing Japanese that the tradition of
Sinico-Japanese has developed. Due to the imperfect learning of
Chinese by the early practitioners and subsequent internal
developments, Sinico-Japanese is neither pure Chinese nor Japanese,
and thus neither Chinese nor Japanese are able to read
Sinico-Japanese texts without special training.
Another literary tradition developed
with the invention of the kana syllabary
around the tenth century, and the language of this tradition, as
represented by the language found in theGenji monogatari (The Tale
of Genji), is believed to have been much closer to the colloquial
speech of the time. However, official writing was carried out
within the Sinico-Japanese tradition, and a few distinct writing
styles that developed within this tradition were maintained in the
written language until the late nineteenth century, when a movement
for matching speech and writing (gen-bun itti) was started by
literary men.
In Japan, Modern Japanese is often
contrasted with Late Old Japanese and Middle Japanese in terms
of gendai-go ‘modern
language’ (or koo-go ‘colloquial language’) versus bun-go ‘literary
language’. The English term “Classical Japanese” largely
corresponds to bungo, though
different scholars use the term more specifically to refer to the
language of any period between the eighth and the fourteenth or the
fifteenth century.
1.1 Overview
Instead of describing the characteristics of the language
of each period, the following exposition traces the entire course
of development of a number of salient features of Japanese.
Following this, a couple of topics of general appeal are taken up
in detail.
The major achievement of the Japanese
of the Nara and the early Heian period is the acquisition of a
writing system. The writing system evolved from both semantically
and phonetically based uses of Chinese characters. The present-day
writing system is the result of simplification of the original
Chinese characters in two ways.
Alongside the use of the original
Chinese characters, the Japanese developed two syllabaries. The
system know as katakana developed
from the abbreviation of Chinese characters, while the other
version of kana called hiragana resulted
from the grass (cursive) style of writing characters. Much more
recently Chinese characters themselves were also simplified leading
to a system that diverges from the original characters. Because of
the recent abbreviation of the characters in mainland China, there
are now three different sets of Chinese characters: the original
complex forms used in Taiwan and the Republic of Korea (in formal
writing), the medially complex complex forms used in Japan and the
Republic of Korea (informal writing), and the most radically
abbreviated forms used in the People’s Republic of China. The
evolution of the writing system will be taken up separately
below.
Contact with a superior culture means
the borrowing of, among other things, lexical items. Japanese is no
exception to this truism, and it borrowed a large number of Chinese
words in early phases of its history. The systematic borrowing of
Chinese words took place in three waves, though sporadic
pre-historic borrowing leaves such deeply ingrained words
asuma ‘horse’
and ume ‘plum’.
The beginning of the first wave of borrowing occurred in the
pre-Nara period when Buddhism was introduced to Japan in A.D. 552
(or 538). The sounds or readings of the Chinese characters
attributed to this first wave of borrowing are known
asgo’on (‘go sound/pronunciation’). It is generally believed
that go refers to
the Wu area of southern China, and thus
the go’on reading is
thought to reflect a southern Chinese dialect of the Six Dynasties
period (ca. beginning of the fourth century to the mid or late
sixth century).
The second wave of Chinese borrowing
took place during the Nara period, when many students and court
officials went to study in Luoyang and Chang’an, the two great
metropolises of the Tang dynasty. The new pronunciation associated
with this second wave of borrowing during the early phase of the
eight century is called kan’on and is
considered to reflect the standard language of the Tang period.
Then, during the fourteenth century, a new vocabulary and
pronunciation were introduced chiefly by the followers of the Zen
sect of Buddhism. This new pronunciation, believed to represent
that of the Hangzhou area of the period, is
called tō-sō’on (‘Tang-Song pronunciation’).
While some characters have three ways
of reading, reflecting the three waves of borrowing, most have only
the go’on and/or kan’on pronunciations, indicating the smaller influence of
thetō-sō’on pronunciation. Also, different pronunciations are
associated with different spheres of
learning: go’on with
Buddhism, kan’on with
Confucian and other secular learning, and tō-sō’on with Zen
Buddhism. However, all this is a historical fact, and average
native speakers of Japanese do not know about these historical
distinctions in pronunciation; they simply learn that a given
character has two or more different readings (see
below).
The first systematic contact with the
Western world was brought about in 1543, when a drifting Portuguese
merchant ship reached an island off Kyūshū. The Portuguese
introduced to Japan not only guns and other Western objects but
also Western words as well as Christianity. The Spaniards and Dutch
followed suit. The second wave of Western borrowing had to wait
until the beginning of the Meiji period, for during the Edo period
the country was closed to the outside world except for limited
contact through the Dutch in Kyūshū, who represented Western
interests. Since the Meiji period English, German, and French have
usurped the position of Dutch as a language of foreign learning,
and after World War II, the third onslaught of foreign loans came
primarily from America. Thus since the Meiji period English loans
have claimed the lion’s share in the vocabulary of Western origin.
A thorough description of the role of foreign loan words is given
separately.
As the vocabulary has been constantly
enriched by borrowing throughout history, the phonological system
has also been affected with the importation of new syllable types.
New syllable types also evolved as as result of internal changes,
but some of these internally created new syllable types are
attributed to influence from the foreign syllables. The canonical
syllable structure of Old Japanese was (C)V, all syllables and
words ending in a vowel, and vowel sequences being avoided.
However, Chinese loans brought in new syllabic types, those ending
in consonants and sequences of vowels. Among the new additions were
the syllable-final nasal and other syllable-final consonants, as
represented by hon ‘book’,
and kekka ‘result’
(and more recent forms such as beddo ‘bed’).
These subsequently gave rise to independent moraic units. Also
forms such as keidai ‘temple
compound’ introduced vowel sequences. It is generally believed that
these imported syllables were instrumental in the internal
development of syllable types after the Heian period,
e.g. yonde < yomite ‘read CONJ’, totte < torite ‘take CONJ’, kaite <kakite ‘write CONJ’, siroi < siroki ‘white ATTR’. Besides this kind of enrichment of the phonological
system, there are also aspects of simplification of the system.
Especially noteworthy is the reduction of the number of syllables
distinguished. Old Japanese of the Nara period is phonologically
most interesting in that it distinguished the greatest known number
of native syllables. The earliest written document of significance,
the Kojiki (Record of
Ancient Matters) (A.D. 713), distinguished eighty-eight syllables,
whereas the Nihon shoki (Chronicle
of Japan) (A.D. 720) distinguished eighty-seven syllables
obliterating the distinction between the
syllables mo1 and mo2. (See Table for
syllable types, and the o1 and o2 and
similar distinctions.) The significantly larger number of syllables
of Old Japanese in contrast to that of Modern Japanese, which
distinguishes sixty-two native syllables, is due to the
distinctions made between the so-called koo (A series)
and otu (B series)
vowels observed in Old Japanese. A distinction, for example, was
made between ki1 and ki2, which merged
into ki in the
ensuing Heian period. It is due to these A and B distinctions that
the hypothesis has been advanced that Old Japanese may have had
more vowels than the present five. For example, the
syllableki in certain
words was written with the character 伎 and in some other words with
the character 紀. Thus the first syllable
in kimi ‘emperor’
was written with the first character as 伎美 (ki-mi), but the
second syllable in the word tuki ‘moon’ was
written with the second character as 都紀 (tu-ki). Distinctions
such as these were fairly consistent and the characters were not
freely interchanged.
The early Heian period saw the
obliteration of the A and B series distinctions noted above, and
further merger of e ([ịe]?)
and je,
and o ([ṷo]?)
and wo resulted
in the radical reduction of the numbers of syllables, of which
there were now sixty-six. This was followed by the merger
ofi and wi and e and we during the
Kamakura period. Entering the Edo period, zi merged
withdi and zu merged
with du, resulting in
the present-day number of sixty-two native syllables.
The accentual system is also believed
to have developed in such as way that newer systems are the results
of mergers of earlier distinctions. While this appears to be the
case with many modern dialect systems, there is considerable debate
as to whether the Kyōto‒Ōsaka system, which makes more
distinctions, is older or newer than the Tōkyō system. This issue
and other notable phonological changes are taken up later, where
the geographical distributions of their remnants are
discussed.
In the realm of syntax there are both
stable and fluctuating aspects. Among the most consistent features
is word order, which has been SOV from the time of Old Japanese,
though observed throughout history is the inverted word order,
which places a subject or object nominal after the verb, for the
expression of afterthought, emphatic assertion, etc. Other
phenomena related to the order of the major constituents are also
systematically exhibited in accord with the basic word order,
making Japanese one of the ideal SOV languages. Thus, modifiers,
e.g. adjectives and adverbs, precede their heads, e.g. nouns and
verbs. Auxiliaries in the form of suffixes consistently follow the
main verb, and adpositional elements in the form of particles are
consistently postpositional. Despite this overall consistency that
run throughout history, the contents of these categories have
undergone considerable degrees of change.
In the case of auxiliary elements,
the system has moved from a richer to a more impoverished one.
Especially noteworthy is the decline in the systems of tense,
aspect, and mood. In Modern Japanese there is only one past tense
suffix ta, which is also
used in an expression of the perfective sense, but in Old Japanese
there was a clear formal distinction between the perfective aspect
and the past tense. Tu, nu, tari,
and ri were
perfective suffixes, the first two having an added meaning of
confirmation. The past tense was expressed
by ki andkeri. Nu, tu, ri, ki and keri disappear
during the Kamakura and Muromachi periods, whiletari begins to
develop into the present-day past-tense
form ta at the end
of the Heian period;tari itself
survives until the end of the Edo period.
In the area of mood, again there were
many forms expressing conjecture, but they too died out before the
end of the Muromachi period. Ramu and rasi contrasted
in terms of firmness of evidence, the former being dubitative and
the latter implying firmer conjecture. Meri was for a
conjecture based on visual evidence, while nari was for
one based on auditory evidence. The present-day
form rasii ‘(it)
seems’ has no directly connected historical antecedent. Although
there was the form rasi, which shows
semblance to rasii, in the Nara
and Heian period, it dies out at the end of the latter period,
and rasii only
emerges in the Edo period.
Compared to these, voice suffixes are
fairly stable. The
spontaneous/potential/passive/honorific raru and the
causative/honorific sasu, which emerged
in the Heian period, survive and are vigorous today in the
forms rare and sase, though the
latter has shed the honorific meaning (except in the subject
honorific expression asoba-su (play-CAUS) ‘do’). The desiderative tai is a new
development from tasi, which took
place toward the end of the Kamakura period.
Particularly interesting is the rise
and fall of the honorific system, since this reflects the social
organization of each period rather clearly. While honorific forms
are seen in the earliest history of the language, the elaboration
of the system started in the Heian period, when the court-centered
society came to maturity. New developments during this period are
1) two levels of honorifics, 2) combination of subject and object
honorific forms, which is not possible in Modern Japanese, and 3)
polite expressions directed toward the addressee. Among the forms
that had two levels of honorifics are: ‘to
be’ owasu (ordinary
honorific): owasimasu (super-honorific), ‘to give’ tamau (ordinary): tamawasu (super).
The elaboration of the honorific
system continues throughout the Kamakura and Muromachi periods,
when political power was transferred to the warrior class, which is
characterized by a strict hierarchical rank system within each clan
as well as across different clans. Howerver, the zenith of the
continued elaboration is witnessed by the Edo period, when the
Tokugawa government issued a decree for the formation of social
classes, which consisted in the decreasing order of 1)
warrior-bureaucrats, 2) the peasants, 3) the artisans, and 4) the
merchants. While there seemed to be a clear class distinction
between the first category and the rest, there does not seem to be
any significant social difference among the people of the latter
three classes. Thus for practical purposes there were two classes,
the warrior-bureaucrats (busi and kuge) and the
townsmen (tyoonin). As can be
surmised, it is among the townsmen that newer honorific forms
developed, as the warrior-bureaucrats continued to use the earlier
honorific forms. In this period, certain expressions developed
three degrees of honorification. For example, for the verb ‘to be,
to come, to go’, gozaimasu is the
super honorific form,gozaru the
ordinary honorific form, and mesaru the
intimate honorific form. Also developed were those forms that
reflect the social class, the sex, and the profession of the
speaker. Ozyaru ‘to come’
and tukamaturu ‘(I) do’
are forms used by warriors, syansu ‘to do’
and the polite endingsgozansu and yansu are
exclusively for female speakers, and the polite
endings gozarinsu andyasu were those
belonging to the language of the amusement quarters.
The elaborate honorific system comes
to an abrupt end when the Meiji Restoration (1867) abolished the
Tokugawa social class system, thus putting an end to feudalism.
Though a new class system consisting of noblemen and the common
people was instituted, the tide of Western democracy and compulsory
education had the effect of simplifying the honorific system
considerably. The present-day honorific expressions are generally
descendants of the newer Edo expressions. The subject honorific
form o/go … ni naru and its
precursor o/go …nasaru are seen
in the dialect of Edo (presently Tōkyō), but its wide use started
only in the middle of the Meiji period, when the polite
ending desu also began
to be widely used. The spread of the object honorific
form o … suru was even
later, i.e. in the late Meiji period.
In the case of particles, a general
trend has been that the adverbial particles have become less
active, while case particles have become more rigidly integrated.
This change in the system of particles has been interpreted as a
reflection of an underlying structural change in the Japanese
language by Sakakura (1977).
The use of certain adverbial
particles had the effect of cutting off the flow of the predication
process, which allowed the insertion of various adverbial
expressions and clauses within a clause. The insertion of complex
adverbial clauses was made largely because certain adverbial
particles participated in a phenomenon
called kakari-musubi, whereby the
occurrence of a particular adverbial particle correlated with a
particular inflectional form of a predicative element; thus even if
the subject nominal marked off by an adverbial particle was
separated from its predicate by an intervening adverbial clause,
the subject and the verb could be paired up because of the rules
of kakari-musubi. Sakakura calls
this characteristic of Late Old, or Classical Japanese of the Heian
period “open structure”. The disintegration of
the kakari-musubi phenomenon
and the concomitant weakening of many of the adverbial particles
during the Kamakura period ushered in the developement of the
nominative case particles, which had the effect of tying the
subject and the predicate in a closer relationship because the
nominative particles developed from the attributive particles that
related two nominal elements under various semantic relationships.
This shift, according to Sakakura, has turned Japanese from an
open-structure language to a closed-structure language, which does
not allow insertion of complex adverbial clauses within a clause,
which was formerly permitted.
Sakakura believes that this is a
major overall structural change that has taken place in the history
of Japanese. This change, which took place over the span of the
Kamakura and Muromachi periods, coincides with a time of great
socio-political upheaval, when the seat of government was
transferred back and forth between Kyōto and Kamakura, crossing a
major bundle of dialect isoglosses. One can agree with Sakakura
that major changes in the Japanese language occurred during this
period without necessarily subscribing to his more speculative
assessment of the cause for the changes, which he attributes to the
theory that the socio-political upheaval of the period brought
together people of different social and regional backgrounds
necessitating a more logical discourse punctuated more clearly by
the use of case particles and characterized by simple,
straightforward sentences.
Having presented an overall picture
of the changes that have taken place in the history of Japanese,
the following sections examine in detail too topics of general
interest. The developments of principal particles are discussed
larer.
1.2 The writing
system
The earliest extant systematic written records of the
Japanese language date back to the eighth century. The oldest among
them, the Kojiki (Record of
Ancient Matters) (A.D. 712), is written in Chinese characters. The
preface to this work is written in Chinese syntax as well. Thus,
the document is not readily intelligible to those who do not know
how the Chinese ordering of elements corresponds to the Japanese
ordering; i.e. while Chinese is basically an SVO language like
English, Japanese is an SOV language. Furthermore it is not clear
how these characters were read; they may have been read purely in
Chinese style in imitation of the Chinese pronunciation of the
characters, or they may have been read in a Japanese way, i.e. by
uttering those Japanese words corresponding in meaning to the
written Chinese characters and inverting the order of elements so
as to follow the Japanese syntax. Perhaps both systems were
practiced.
By the time
the Man’yōshū (Collection of a Myriad Leaves), an anthology of Japanese
verse, was completed (A.D. 759), the Japanese had mastered the use
of Chinese characters as a phonetic means of writing Japanese. For
example, the Japanese word yama ‘mountain’
could be written phonetically by using a combination of characters
with a sound similar to ya (e.g. 夜
‘evening’) and another character with a sound
like ma (e.g. 麻
‘hemp’) as 夜麻. In other words, what stands for ‘mountain’ could now
be written in two ways. One used the Chinese word and its character
山. The other way was to choose Chinese characters read
as ya and ma. This practice
helped establish a relation between the original character and its
Japanese semantic equivalent leading to the practice of assigning a
dual reading to Chinese characters: one a Chinese reading
(on-yomi) and the other
a Japanese reading (kun-yomi). This means
that a character such as 山 ‘mountain’ was read both
as san, the Chinese
reading, and as yama, the Japanese
reading. This practice of reading Chinese characters both in the
Chinese way and the Japanese way persists even today (see
below).
The phonetically used characters are
known as man’yoo-gana among
Japanese grammarians because their most diversified use is seen in
the Man’yōshū, though their
earlier use is seen in other writings, e.g. the songs in
the Kojiki. This kind of
phonetic use of Chinese characters as purely phonetic
representation of words is most likely not the invention of the
Japanese at the time. It was practiced in China in rendering
foreign names, place names, official titles, and especially in
transliterating Sanskrit Buddhist terms. The same was done by the
Koreans who used Chinese characters phonetically in indicating
grammatical particles and inflectional endings as an aid in reading
documents written in the Chinese manner. Since the early tutors of
the Chinese language in Japan were Koreans, it is reasonable to
assume that their practice at home influenced the rendering of
Japanese in terms of Chinese characters.
Next came the development of
syllabary writings known as kana, originally
pronounced askarina. Two kinds
of kana have
developed as a simplification of man’yoo-gana.
Originally,kana were used
as mnemonic symbols for reading characters and were written
alongside them.Katakana ‘partial kana’ developed as
abbreviations of characters, and they retain a squarish
shape. Hiragana ‘plain kana’, on the other
hand, have been developed by simplifying the grass (i.e. cursive)
style of writing characters, and they are round in shape. Examples
of these two types of kana and their
sources are shown below, and the complete
contemporarykana syllabaries are set out in Table 1.1.
(Voicing oppositions, where applicable, are indicated by
diacritical dots on the upper right-hand corner of
each kana,
e.g. gi ぎ, ギ as
opposed to ki き, キ. を
and ヲ, used only in writing the accusative
particle o are
pronounced the same ways as お and オ, which are used in all other
instances of the o sound. は
and ハ are pronounced as wa when they
are used to write the topic particle wa. へ and ヘ are
pronounced as e when used
to write the directional particle e. Among the
missing syllables in the table, the kana for wi and we exist but
they are no longer in common use, as the sounds have merged
with i and e.)
The orthodox Sinico-Japanese, or kanbun, manner of
writing was a formal writing method. The
phonetic kana wrting was
considered only “temporay” or mnemonic in nature. Despite this
secondary status of kana, they were
eagerly used by women with literary aspirations, who were
discouraged from learning Chinese characters, which belonged to
men’s domain of learning and official writings. Indeed
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