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Early Middle Japanese
is a stage of the Japanese language between 794 and 1185, which is known as the Heian period (). The successor to Old Japanese (), it is also known as Late Old Japanese. However, the term "Early Middle Japanese" is preferred, as it is closer to Late Middle Japanese (, after 1185) than to Old Japanese (before 794). Background Old Japanese had borrowed and adapted the Chinese script to write Japanese. In Early Middle Japanese, two new scripts emerged: the kana scripts hiragana and katakana. That development simplified writing and brought about a new age in literature, with many classics such as ''The Tale of Genji'', '' The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter'', and '' The Tales of Ise''. Writing system Early Middle Japanese was written in three different ways. It was first recorded in Man'yōgana (), literally "ten thousand leaves borrowed labels", in reference to the ''Man'yōshū'' poetry anthology and the "borrowing" of the kanji characters as "labels" for the sounds of Japanese. Certa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Japan
Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea in the south. The Japanese archipelago consists of four major islands—Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu—and List of islands of Japan, thousands of smaller islands, covering . Japan has a population of over 123 million as of 2025, making it the List of countries and dependencies by population, eleventh-most populous country. The capital of Japan and List of cities in Japan, its largest city is Tokyo; the Greater Tokyo Area is the List of largest cities, largest metropolitan area in the world, with more than 37 million inhabitants as of 2024. Japan is divided into 47 Prefectures of Japan, administrative prefectures and List of regions of Japan, eight traditional regions. About three-quarters of Geography of Japan, the countr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kanji
are logographic Chinese characters, adapted from Chinese family of scripts, Chinese script, used in the writing of Japanese language, Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequently-derived Syllabary, syllabic scripts of and . The characters have Japanese pronunciations; most have two, with one based on the Chinese sound. A few characters were invented in Japan by constructing character components derived from other Chinese characters. After the Meiji Restoration, Japan made its own efforts to simplify the characters, now known as , by a process similar to China's simplified Chinese characters, simplification efforts, with the intention to increase literacy among the general public. Since the 1920s, the Japanese government has published character lists periodically to help direct the education of its citizenry through the myriad Chinese characters that exist. There are nearly 3 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Modern Japanese
is the principal language of the Japonic language family spoken by the Japanese people. It has around 123 million speakers, primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language, and within the Japanese diaspora worldwide. The Japonic family also includes the Ryukyuan languages and the variously classified Hachijō language. There have been many attempts to group the Japonic languages with other families such as Ainu, Austronesian, Koreanic, and the now discredited Altaic, but none of these proposals have gained any widespread acceptance. Little is known of the language's prehistory, or when it first appeared in Japan. Chinese documents from the 3rd century AD recorded a few Japanese words, but substantial Old Japanese texts did not appear until the 8th century. From the Heian period (794–1185), extensive waves of Sino-Japanese vocabulary entered the language, affecting the phonology of Early Middle Japanese. Late Middle Japanese (1185–1600) saw ext ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Traditional Chinese Characters
Traditional Chinese characters are a standard set of Chinese character forms used to written Chinese, write Chinese languages. In Taiwan, the set of traditional characters is regulated by the Ministry of Education (Taiwan), Ministry of Education and standardized in the ''Standard Form of National Characters''. These forms were predominant in written Chinese until the middle of the 20th century, when various Chinese family of scripts, countries that use Chinese characters began standardizing simplified sets of characters, often with characters that existed before as well-known variant Chinese characters, variants of the predominant forms. Simplified characters as codified by the People's Republic of China are predominantly used in mainland China, Malaysia, and Singapore. "Traditional" as such is a retronym applied to non-simplified character sets in the wake of widespread use of simplified characters. Traditional characters are commonly used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kyūjitai
''Kyūjitai'' () are the traditional forms of kanji (Chinese written characters used in Japanese writing). Their simplified counterparts are '' shinjitai'' (). 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. An example is the character for "electric", which is still the traditional form of in Japan, but has been simplified to in mainland China (pronounced "diàn" in Chinese, and "den" in Japanese). Prior to the promulgation of the ''tōyō'' kanji list in 1946, ''kyūjitai'' were known as ''seiji'' () or ''seijitai'' (). Even after ''kyūjitai'' were officially marked for discontinuation with the promulgation of the ''tōyō'' kanji list, they were used in print frequently into the 1950s due to logistical delays i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Orthography
An orthography is a set of convention (norm), conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, Word#Word boundaries, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and Emphasis (typography), emphasis. Most national and international languages have an established writing system that has undergone substantial standardization, thus exhibiting less dialect variation than the spoken language. These processes can fossilize pronunciation patterns that are no longer routinely observed in speech (e.g. ''would'' and ''should''); they can also reflect deliberate efforts to introduce variability for the sake of national identity, as seen in Noah Webster's efforts to introduce easily noticeable differences between American and British spelling (e.g. ''honor'' and ''honour''). Orthographic norms develop through social and political influence at various levels, such as encounters with print in education, the workplace, and the state. Some nations have established ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 es ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dakuten And Handakuten
The , colloquially , is a diacritic most often used in the Japanese kana syllabaries to indicate that the consonant of a mora should be pronounced voiced, for instance, on sounds that have undergone rendaku (sequential voicing). The , colloquially , is a diacritic used with kana for morae pronounced with or to indicate that they should instead be pronounced with . Glyphs The ''dakuten'' resembles a quotation mark, while the ''handakuten'' is a small circle, similar to a degree sign, both placed at the top right corner of a kana character: * * * * * * Both the ''dakuten'' and ''handakuten'' glyphs are drawn identically in hiragana and katakana scripts. The combining characters are rarely used in full-width Japanese characters, as Unicode and all common multibyte Japanese encodings provide precomposed glyphs for all possible ''dakuten'' and ''handakuten'' character combinations in the standard hiragana and katakana ranges. However, combining characters are required ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Meiji (era)
The was an era of Japanese history that extended from October 23, 1868, to July 30, 1912. The Meiji era was the first half of the Empire of Japan, when the Japanese people moved from being an isolated feudal society at risk of colonization by Western powers to the new paradigm of a modern, industrialized nation state and emergent great power, influenced by Western scientific, technological, philosophical, political, legal, and aesthetic ideas. As a result of such wholesale adoption of radically different ideas, the changes to Japan were profound, and affected its social structure, internal politics, economy, military, and foreign relations. The period corresponded to the reign of Emperor Meiji. It was preceded by the Keiō era and was succeeded by the Taishō era, upon the accession of Emperor Taishō. The rapid modernization during the Meiji era was not without its opponents, as the rapid changes to society caused many disaffected traditionalists from the former samu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hentaigana
In the Japanese writing system, are variant forms of hiragana. Description In contrast to modern Japanese, originally hiragana had several forms for a single sound. For example, while the hiragana reading "ha" has only one form in modern Japanese (は), until the Meiji era (1868–1912) it was written in various forms, including , , and . The shift to using only one character for each sound occurred as part of the Japanese script reform, 1900 script reform,, 1900 revision which also included other changes to the written language to standardize spelling (and was part of Meiji Restoration, a larger project to westernize the country). Because the selection of which hiragana glyphs would become standardized was instituted by the government at the time (rather than as a natural evolution of the writing system) variant kana are effectively unused in modern Japan, save for some limited situations such as signboards, calligraphy, place names, and personal names.#築島1981、pp.3 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mora (linguistics)
A mora (plural ''morae'' or ''moras''; often symbolized μ) is a smallest unit of timing, equal to or shorter than a syllable, that theoretically or perceptually exists in some spoken languages in which phonetic length (such as vowel length) matters significantly. For example, in the Japanese language, the name of the city '' Ōsaka'' () consists of three syllables (''O-sa-ka'') but four morae (), since the first syllable, ''Ō'', is pronounced with a long vowel (the others being short). Thus, a short vowel contains one mora and is called ''monomoraic'', while a long vowel contains two and is called ''bimoraic''. Extra-long syllables with three morae (''trimoraic'') are relatively rare. Such metrics based on syllables are also referred to as syllable weight. In Japanese, certain consonants also stand on their own as individual morae and thus are monomoraic. The term comes from the Latin word for 'linger, delay', which was also used to translate the Greek word : ('time') in it ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Man'yōgana
is an ancient writing system that uses Chinese characters to represent the Japanese language. It was the first known kana system to be developed as a means to represent the Japanese language phonetically. The date of the earliest usage of this type of kana is not clear, but it was in use since at least the mid-7th century. The name "man'yōgana" derives from the '' Man'yōshū'', a Japanese poetry anthology from the Nara period written with ''man'yōgana.'' Texts using the system also often use Chinese characters for their meaning, but ''man'yōgana'' refers to such characters only when they are used to represent a phonetic value. The values were derived from the contemporary Chinese pronunciation, but native Japanese readings of the character were also sometimes used. For example, (whose character means 'tree') could represent (based on Middle Chinese ), , or (meaning 'tree' in Old Japanese). Simplified versions of ''man'yōgana'' eventually gave rise to both the hira ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
