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Classical Japanese Language
The classical Japanese language ( ''bungo'', "literary language"), also called "old writing" ( ''kobun''), sometimes simply called "Medieval Japanese" is the literary form of the Japanese language that was the standard until the early Shōwa period (1926–1989). It is based on Early Middle Japanese, the language as spoken during the Heian period (794–1185), but exhibits some later influences. Its use started to decline during the late Meiji period (1868–1912) when novelists started writing their works in the spoken form. Eventually, the spoken style came into widespread use, including in major newspapers, but many official documents were still written in the old style. After the end of World War II, most documents switched to the spoken style, although the classical style continues to be used in traditional genres, such as haiku and waka. Old laws are also left in the classical style unless fully revised. History Classical Japanese began to be written during the Heia ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Japan
Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north toward the East China Sea, Philippine Sea, and Taiwan in the south. Japan is a part of the Ring of Fire, and spans an archipelago of 6852 islands covering ; the five main islands are Hokkaido, Honshu (the "mainland"), Shikoku, Kyushu, and Okinawa. Tokyo is the nation's capital and largest city, followed by Yokohama, Osaka, Nagoya, Sapporo, Fukuoka, Kobe, and Kyoto. Japan is the eleventh most populous country in the world, as well as one of the most densely populated and urbanized. About three-fourths of the country's terrain is mountainous, concentrating its population of 123.2 million on narrow coastal plains. Japan is divided into 47 administrative prefectures and eight traditional regions. The Greater Tokyo Ar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Edo Period
The or is the period between 1603 and 1867 in the history of Japan, when Japan was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and the country's 300 regional ''daimyo''. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengoku period, the Edo period was characterized by economic growth, strict social order, isolationist foreign policies, a stable population, perpetual peace, and popular enjoyment of arts and culture. The period derives its name from Edo (now Tokyo), where on March 24, 1603, the shogunate was officially established by Tokugawa Ieyasu. The period came to an end with the Meiji Restoration and the Boshin War, which restored imperial rule to Japan. Consolidation of the shogunate The Edo period or Tokugawa period is the period between 1603 and 1867 in the history of Japan, when Japan was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and the country's regional ''daimyo''. A revolution took place from the time of the Kamakura shogunate, which existed with the Tennō's court, to th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Sino-Japanese Vocabulary
Sino-Japanese vocabulary, also known as refers to Japanese vocabulary that had originated in Chinese or were created from elements borrowed from Chinese. Some grammatical structures and sentence patterns can also be identified as Sino-Japanese. Sino-Japanese vocabulary is referred to in Japanese as , meaning 'Chinese words'. ''Kango'' is one of three broad categories into which the Japanese vocabulary is divided. The others are native Japanese vocabulary ('' yamato kotoba'') and borrowings from other, mainly Western languages ('' gairaigo''). It is estimated that approximately 60% of the words contained in the modern written Japanese dictionary are ''kango'', with about 18%–20% of words being used in common speech. The usage of such ''Kango'' words also increases when they are used in formal or literary contexts, or to express abstract or complex ideas. ''Kango'', the use of Chinese-derived words in Japanese, is to be distinguished from '' kanbun'', which is historical Litera ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Late Middle Japanese
was a stage of the Japanese language following Early Middle Japanese and preceding Early Modern Japanese. It was a period of transition in which the language shed many of its archaic features and became closer to its modern form. The period spanned roughly 500 years from the 12th century to the 16th century and is customarily divided into Early and Late periods. Politically, the first half of Late Middle Japanese was the end of the Heian period, known as ''Insei'' and the Kamakura period. The second half of Late Middle Japanese was the Muromachi period. Background The late 12th century was a time of transition from the aristocratic society of nobles in the Heian period to the feudal society of the warrior class. Accompanying that change, the political center moved with the establishment of various shogunates in the east. Various new Buddhist movements began and literacy increased because of their spread. In the mid-16th century, Portuguese Christian missionaries arri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Modern Kana Usage
is the present official '' kanazukai'' (system of spelling the Japanese syllabary). Also known as , it is derived from historical usage. History As long ago as the Meiji Restoration, there had been dissatisfaction regarding the growing discrepancy between spelling and speech. On November 16, 1946, soon after World War II, the cabinet instituted the modern Japanese orthography as part of a general orthographic reform. The system was further amended in 1986. General differences There were no small kana in the pre-reform system; thus, for example, would be ambiguous between ''kiyo'' and ''kyo'' while could be either ''katsuta'' or ''katta''. The pronunciation of medial ''h''-row kana as ''w''-row kana in the pre-reform system does not extend to compound words; thus, was pronounced ''nihon'', not ''nion'' (via **''niwon''). There are a small number of counterexamples; e.g., "duck", pronounced ''ahiru'' rather than ''airu'', or , pronounced Fujiwara, despite being a compoun ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Kana
The term may refer to a number of syllabaries used to write Japanese phonological units, morae. Such syllabaries include (1) the original kana, or , which were Chinese characters (kanji) used phonetically to transcribe Japanese, the most prominent magana system being ; the two descendants of man'yōgana, (2) , and (3) . There are also , which are historical variants of the now-standard hiragana. In current usage, 'kana' can simply mean ''hiragana'' and ''katakana''. Katakana, with a few additions, are also used to write Ainu. A number of systems exist to write the Ryūkyūan languages, in particular Okinawan, in hiragana. Taiwanese kana were used in Taiwanese Hokkien as glosses (ruby text or '' furigana'') for Chinese characters in Taiwan when it was under Japanese rule. Each kana character ( syllabogram) corresponds to one sound or whole syllable in the Japanese language, unlike kanji regular script, which corresponds to a meaning ( logogram). Apart from the five vo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Old Chinese
Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 BC, in the late Shang dynasty. Bronze inscriptions became plentiful during the following Zhou dynasty. The latter part of the Zhou period saw a flowering of literature, including classical works such as the '' Analects'', the ''Mencius'', and the '' Zuo zhuan''. These works served as models for Literary Chinese (or Classical Chinese), which remained the written standard until the early twentieth century, thus preserving the vocabulary and grammar of late Old Chinese. Old Chinese was written with several early forms of Chinese characters, including Oracle Bone, Bronze, and Seal scripts. Throughout the Old Chinese period, there was a close correspondence between a character and a monosyllabic and monomorphemic word. Although the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese (formerly known as Ancient Chinese) or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese recorded in the ''Qieyun'', a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expanded editions. The Swedish linguist Bernard Karlgren believed that the dictionary recorded a speech standard of the capital Chang'an of the Sui and Tang dynasties. However, based on the more recently recovered preface of the ''Qieyun'', most scholars now believe that it records a compromise between northern and southern reading and poetic traditions from the late Northern and Southern dynasties period. This composite system contains important information for the reconstruction of the preceding system of Old Chinese phonology (early 1st millennium BC). The '' fanqie'' method used to indicate pronunciation in these dictionaries, though an improvement on earlier methods, proved awkward in practice. The mid-12th-century '' Yunjing'' and other rime tables inc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Mandarin Chinese
Mandarin (; ) is a group of Chinese (Sinitic) dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language of China. Because Mandarin originated in North China and most Mandarin dialects are found in the north, the group is sometimes referred to as Northern Chinese (). Many varieties of Mandarin, such as those of the Southwest (including Sichuanese) and the Lower Yangtze, are not mutually intelligible with the standard language (or are only partially intelligible). Nevertheless, Mandarin as a group is often placed first in lists of languages by number of native speakers (with nearly one billion). Mandarin is by far the largest of the seven or ten Chinese dialect groups; it is spoken by 70 percent of all Chinese speakers over a large geographical area that stretches from Yunnan in the southwest to Xinjiang in the northwest and Heilongjia ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Traditional Chinese Characters
Traditional Chinese characters are one type of standard Chinese characters, Chinese character sets of the contemporary written Chinese. The traditional characters had taken shapes since the libian, clerical change and mostly remained in the same structure they took at the introduction of the regular script in the 2nd century. Over the following centuries, traditional characters were regarded as the standard form of printed Chinese characters or Classical Chinese, literary Chinese Adoption of Chinese literary culture, throughout the Sinosphere until the middle of the 20th century, before different script reforms initiated by Chinese family of scripts, countries using Chinese characters as a writing system. Traditional Chinese characters remain in common use in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, as well as in most overseas Chinese communities outside Southeast Asia; in addition, Hanja in Korean language#Writing system, Korean language remains virtually identical to traditional charac ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Shinjitai
are the simplified forms of kanji used in Japan since the promulgation of the Tōyō Kanji List in 1946. Some of the new forms found in ''shinjitai'' are also found in Simplified Chinese characters, but ''shinjitai'' is generally not as extensive in the scope of its modification. ''Shinjitai'' were created by reducing the number of strokes in ''kyūjitai'' ("old character form") or , which is unsimplified kanji (usually similar to Traditional Chinese characters). This simplification was achieved through a process (similar to that of simplified Chinese) of either replacing the ''onpu'' (, "sound mark") indicating the ''On'' reading with another ''onpu'' of the same ''On'' reading with fewer strokes, or replacing a complex component of a character with a simpler one. There have been a few stages of simplifications made since the 1950s, but the only changes that became official were the changes in the Jōyō Kanji List in 1981 and 2010. Background The following forms were est ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Kyūjitai
''Kyūjitai'' ( ja, 舊字體 / 旧字体, lit=old character forms) are the traditional forms of kanji, Chinese written characters used in Japanese. Their simplified counterparts are '' shinjitai'' ( ja, 新字体, lit=new character forms, label=none). Some of the simplified characters arose centuries ago and were in everyday use in both China and Japan, but they were considered inelegant, even uncouth. After World War II, simplified character forms were made official in both these countries. However, in Japan fewer and less drastic simplifications were made: for example, "electric" is still written as "" in Japan, as it is also written in Hong Kong, Macau, South Korea and Taiwan, which continue to use traditional Chinese characters, but has been simplified to in mainland China. Prior to the promulgation of the ''tōyō'' kanji list in 1946, ''kyūjitai'' were known as ''seiji'' ( ja, 正字, lit=proper/correct characters, label=none) or ''seijitai'' (). Even after ' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |