If you were to ask someone to give an explanation of the Japanese language, it is more than likely this will be confined to its modern form, the Japanese we speak in the present day. The Japanese writing system, in particular, can be quite easily summarised. There are two forms of kana – hiragana and katakana – that are used to represent sounds. Katakana is used chiefly for foreign words, and hiragana chiefly for grammatical suffixes and for native words. On top of this, there are kanji, characters imported from China, which possess meaning in themselves and represent ideas. In modern Japanese, these three writing systems coexist to form a cohesive language.
But how did it get to be like that? What caused Japanese to take the shape it has now?
Unfortunately, any language has a history that covers thousands of years of time. And due to its oral nature as well as the fact that not every written source survived to this day, it is impossible to recreate an exact, direct timeline of a language’s genesis to now. However, over this series of articles, I will attempt to recreate a chronological journey of the written history of Japanese. I’ve based many of my observations on Nakami Yamaguchi’s fascinating book, A History of the Japanese Language (nihongo no rekishi).
The Origins of Japanese Writing
It is unclear exactly where Japanese originated. Some posit that the language originated from a merging between an Austronesian language group from the south, and an Altaic language group (including Turkic, Tungusic and Mongolian language families, and maybe Korean and Japanese) from the north. Some scholars treat both Japanese and Korean as isolates.
It is unclear when Japanese writing first appeared. Scholars place its emergence somewhere between the late-3rd century, according to the Kojiki (古事記; one of the first collections of myths and histories of Japan, written c. 711), or during the 4th century. Before this, Japanese was a purely spoken language.
In most cultures, language has existed for a much longer time in an oral form than a written one. In a society where a language is spoken and not written, it can be argued that words possess more power. Although there is no “factual” evidence as such, there are a number of elements seen in the society of the time that back up this claim.
The Power of Words
Nakami Yamaguchi presents the idea of the kotodama belief, (言霊信仰) written about in the Manyōshū (万葉集; a collection of poetry compiled around 756), that posits that mystical powers dwell within words. An example given in the Manyōshū (poem 3254) says that, “Japan is a nation preserved by kotodama. If I tell you to be safe, then indeed you shall be so.” Indeed, with a language so rich in homonyms, it is easier to see how this idea would take root, especially within a society without writing. For example, the words for “four” and “death” can be easily differentiated by the character used for those who live in a society with written language (四 and 死 respectively), but in a verbal society these both simply exist as the homonym “shi.”
There are examples of the importance of kotodama in Japanese society. The Shoku Nihongi (続日本紀; an imperially commissioned Japanese history, completed in 797) relates the story of Kiyomaro, a Japanese official who was exiled by Dōkyō, a Nara period (710-794) monk, after Kiyomaro exposed his wicked plans. Dōkyō punished Kiyomaro by changing his name from Kiyomaro (清麻呂; lit. pure-maro) to Kitanamaro (穢麻呂; lit. tainted-maro) and subsequently exiling him. From this, it is clear to see how someone’s being is encapsulated in their name.
Finally, there is a Rumpelstiltskin-esque story called The Carpenter and Oniroku. The story tells of a carpenter who got an ogre to build him a bridge. The ogre struck a deal with the carpenter, and said that he would do it. But, if the carpenter could not guess the ogre’s name, he would have to give up his eyes. The carpenter ran away to the mountains in fear, but he soon heard the ogre’s child singing as he searched for him, “I can’t wait till Oniroku brings his eyes.” The carpenter surmised the ogre’s name was Oniroku, and upon guessing it, the ogre lost all magical powers.
The Beginnings of Writing in Japan
At any rate, the society was growing, and although an oral language was fine for a smaller society, a larger one would struggle without writing. Although storytellers could be trusted with passing down an oral history, what would happen if they suddenly were to die? The society’s history would be lost. The Japanese people of the time decided writing would be the best way to preserve their histories. But what were they to do? There were two options – to create a whole new writing system, or borrow a pre-existing one. A far simpler option, the Japanese of the time chose the latter and decided to take kanji, Chinese characters, from their largest neighbor, China.
What are Kanji?
Kanji are ideographs. Whereas English uses an alphabet, letters which represent sounds and nothing else, kanji are ideographs, which means that the characters have an inherent meaning as well as pronunciation. The earliest confirmed use of Chinese script in China is estimated to be around 1200 BC.
Despite the fact that borrowing a writing system is easier than creating a new one, there were a number of hurdles with fitting Japanese, a completely different language to Chinese, onto Chinese characters. After all, Chinese follows a completely different grammatical structure and doesn’t have certain concepts that exist within Japanese. In this way, numerous strategies for writing Japanese in kanji were attempted.
What the Japanese of the time did was take each character and assign the Japanese word with the same meaning to it. For example, they would take the kanji for mountain, 山, and read it as “yama”. Not only this, but they would also take the Chinese reading for it, “san”. However, the fact that each kanji procured multiple readings could be argued as the biggest flaw of adopting kanji. Whereas in Korea they only took the Chinese readings for the kanji they borrowed, in Japanese this resulted in many cases where you cannot always be sure how to read a word. This ideographic usage will be covered in the next article.
Developing a Phonetic System
As mentioned earlier, what were the Japanese to do if they wanted to represent particles, honorific language, or proper nouns that didn’t exist in Chinese grammar? What would they do if they wanted you to be able to read a sentence without getting confused as how to read it? After all, all they had were kanji. And so, they decided to use kanji in a way that would suit Japanese – they would use them phonetically.
By the Nara period, Japan took the Chinese sound of each kanji that corresponded to sounds in Japanese and use them to represent these sounds. So, if a Chinese character was pronounced “ko”, then this character would be used to represent the Japanese sound “ko.” Unlike the method above, this would make sure that the reader knew exactly how to read it. When using kanji phonetically, the inherent meaning in each ideograph was ignored and they were used simply for their sounds. To a Chinese speaker, it looked like total nonsense. But a Japanese speaker could read it without issue. For example, although 夜麻 looks like “night flax” it means “yama” (mountain), because the kanji are pronounced “ya” and “ma” respectively.
Using kanji to represent Japanese words specifically was called kunyomi (訓読み; the practice of reading something in a Japanese way), and the method of writing was called manyōgana. Manyōgana, named because of its extensive use in the Manyōshū poetry collection, would eventually evolve into the hiragana and katakana writing systems that we know today.
Manyōgana
The base rule for manyōgana is to use one kanji for one sound. Although the Japanese tried to make sure the same kanji was used for the same sound, for example to always use 己 for the sound “ko”, there were cases where other kanji were used, such as 古, 故, or 高. Indeed, this resulted in multiple different varieties of hiragana which were only codified in the Meiji period (again, this will be covered later). In the instance of kanji which had longer sounds such as 安 (pronounced “an”), only the first sound of “a” was taken.
Manyōgana gives us a rare insight into the pronunciation of Japanese of the Nara period. In modern Japanese, there are only 44 sounds with unvoiced consonants and 18 sounds with voiced consonants (excluding ん). But in the Nara period there were 61 sounds with unvoiced consonants and 27 sounds with voiced consonants. The usage of different manyōgana helps to show us this. For example, when the words こひ (恋) and こゑ (声) were written in manyōgana they each used a non-overlapping different manyōgana for the “ko” (こ) part. So where you would see 古, 故, or 高 be used for the ko in “こひ”, manyōgana such as 許, 去, or 居 were used for the ko in “こゑ”. Despite different manyōgana being used, these sets never overlapped. This indicates that even though “ko” in these two words is pronounced the same now, they were pronounced differently back then.
Unfortunately, although we know they were pronounced differently, it is impossible to say exactly how they did differ.
Although Nara period Japanese has many more sounds to modern Japanese, one thing that didn’t exist then are palatized sounds such as kya, gyo.
Conclusion
Due to the peculiarities of each period, we only have a snapshot as to what kind of language was used. The biggest source we have of writing in the Nara period is the famous poetry collection, the Manyōshū. The fact that this is poetry gives a biased account of what words were being used at the time, but it is fascinating to see that a lot of Japanese native words were used in it.
By the end of the Nara period, the Japanese people had developed a method of writing their language in the borrowed kanji. However, this would only be the foundation of written Japanese and the language would have more changes to come, especially in the subsequent Heian period.
What to read next
Japanese Writing: The Birth of Kana in the Heian Period
Sources
Yamaguchi, Nakami, Nihongo no rekishi, 29th edn., (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2019)
Satō, Takeyoshi, Gaisetsu nihongo no rekishi, 14th edn., (Tokyo: Asakura shoten, 2009)
Pereltsvaig, Asya, Languages of the World: An Introduction, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)
国宝 真福寺本古事記原文 (n.d.) Retrieved from http://www.kojiki.org/seikai/set-jobun01.htm
Oracle Bone Script (甲骨文) (n.d.) Retrieved from https://www.omniglot.com/chinese/jiaguwen.htm
