was the stage of the

Japanese language is spoken natively by about 128 million people, primarily by Japanese people and primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language. Japanese belongs to the Japonic or Japanese- Ryukyuan language family. There have been ...

after Middle Japanese and before

Modern Japanese Modern may refer to: History *Modern history ** Early Modern period ** Late Modern period *** 18th century *** 19th century *** 20th century ** Contemporary history * Moderns, a faction of Freemasonry that existed in the 18th century Philosoph ...

. It is a period of transition that shed many of the language's medieval characteristics and became closer to its modern form. The period spanned roughly 250 years and extended from the 17th century to the first half of the 19th century. Politically, it generally corresponded to the

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 characte ...

Background

At the beginning of the 17th century, the center of government moved to Edo from

Kamigata Kamigata (上方) was the colloquial term for a region today called Kansai (''kan'', barrier; ''sai'', west) in Japan. This large area encompasses the cities of Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe. The term is used particularly when discussing elements of Edo ...

under the control of the

Tokugawa shogunate The Tokugawa shogunate (, Japanese 徳川幕府 ''Tokugawa bakufu''), also known as the , was the military government of Japan during the Edo period from 1603 to 1868. Nussbaum, Louis-Frédéric. (2005)"''Tokugawa-jidai''"in ''Japan Encyclopedia ...

. Until the early

, the Kamigata dialect, the ancestor of the modern

Kansai dialect The is a group of Japanese dialects in the Kansai region (Kinki region) of Japan. In Japanese, is the common name and it is called in technical terms. The dialects of Kyoto and Osaka are known as , and were particularly referred to as suc ...

, was the most influential dialect. However, in the late Edo period, the Edo dialect, the ancestor of the modern

Tokyo dialect The Tokyo dialect () is a variety of Japanese language spoken in modern Tokyo. As a whole, it is generally considered to be Standard Japanese, though specific aspects of slang or pronunciation can vary by area and social class. Overview Tr ...

, became the most influential dialect, and Japan closed its borders to foreigners. Compared to the previous centuries, the Tokugawa rule brought about much newfound stability. That made the importance of the

warrior A warrior is a person specializing in combat or warfare, especially within the context of a tribal or clan-based warrior culture society that recognizes a separate warrior aristocracies, class, or caste. History Warriors seem to have be ...

class gradually fall and replaced it with the merchant class. There was much economic growth, and new artistic developments appeared, such as

Ukiyo-e Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art which flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries. Its artists produced woodblock prints and paintings of such subjects as female beauties; kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers; scenes from history and folk t ...

Kabuki is a classical form of Japanese dance- drama. Kabuki theatre is known for its heavily-stylised performances, the often-glamorous costumes worn by performers, and for the elaborate make-up worn by some of its performers. Kabuki is though ...

, and

Bunraku (also known as ) is a form of traditional Japanese puppet theatre, founded in Osaka in the beginning of the 17th century, which is still performed in the modern day. Three kinds of performers take part in a performance: the or (puppeteers ...

. New literary genres such as Ukiyozōshi,

Sharebon which can be roughly translated as "book of manners", was a pre-modern Japanese literary genre, produced during the middle of the Edo period from the 1720's all the way to the end of the 18th century. Plots almost invariably took place in the Yos ...

(pleasure districts),

Kokkeibon The was a genre and type of early modern Japanese novel. It came into being late in the Edo period during the 19th century. As a genre, it depicted the comical behavior occurring in commoners' daily lives. The ''kokkeibon'' genre is the successo ...

(commoners), and Ninjōbon also developed. Major authors included

Ihara Saikaku was a Japanese poet and creator of the " floating world" genre of Japanese prose (''ukiyo-zōshi''). Born as Hirayama Tōgo (平山藤五), the son of a wealthy merchant in Osaka, he first studied haikai poetry under Matsunaga Teitoku and later ...

Chikamatsu Monzaemon was a Japanese dramatist of jōruri, the form of puppet theater that later came to be known as bunraku, and the live-actor drama, kabuki. The ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' has written that he is "widely regarded as the greatest Japanese dramatis ...

, Matsuo Bashō,

Shikitei Sanba , better known by his pen name , was a Japanese comic writer of the Edo period. Major works *''Ukiyoburo is a Japanese novel written by Shikitei Sanba between 1809 and 1813. It belongs to the kokkeibon genre, of which it is one of the masterp ...

, and Santō Kyōden.

Phonology

Consonants

Middle Japanese had the following

consonants In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced wit ...

: /t, s, z, h/ all have a number of

allophone In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in '' ...

s before the high vowels , ɯ *t → / __i *t → / __ɯ *z → / __i *z → / __ɯ *h → / __i *h → / __ɯ Several major developments occurred: */zi, di/ and /zu, du/, respectively, no longer contrasted. */h/ partially developed from �into , ç */se/ lost its palatalization and became . Middle Japanese had a syllable final -t, which was gradually replaced by the open syllable /tu/.

Labialization

The labial /kwa, gwa/ merged with their non-labial counterparts into a, ga

Palatalization

The consonants /s, z/, /t/, /n/, /h, b/, /p/, /m/, and /r/ could be palatalized. Depalatalization could also be seen in the Edo dialect: * > * > "lord" * > "life"

Prenasalization

Middle Japanese had a series of

prenasalized Prenasalized consonants are phonetic sequences of a nasal and an obstruent (or occasionally a non-nasal sonorant such as ) that behave phonologically like single consonants. The primary reason for considering them to be single consonants, rather ...

voiced Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer ...

plosives In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lips ...

and

fricatives A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in t ...

: . In Early Modern Japanese, they lost their prenasalization, which resulted in .

Grammar

Verbs

Early Modern Japanese has five

verb A verb () is a word ( part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descr ...

al conjugations: As had already begun in Middle Japanese, the verbal morphology system continued to evolve. The total number of verb classes was reduced from nine to five. Specifically, the r-irregular and n-irregular regularized as quadrigrade, and the upper and lower bigrade classes merged with their respective monograde. That left the quadrigrade, upper monograde, lower monograde, k-irregular, and s-irregular.Yamaguchi (1997:129)

Adjectives

There were two types of adjectives: regular

adjectives In linguistics, an adjective (abbreviated ) is a word that generally modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives were considered one of the mai ...

and adjectival nouns. Historically, adjectives were subdivided into two classes: those whose adverbial form ended in -ku and those that ended in –siku. That distinction was lost in Early Modern Japanese. Historically, the adjectival noun was sub-divided into two categories: -nar and -tar. In Early Modern Japanese, -tar vanished and left only -na.

Notes

References

* * * * * * * {{Authority control Japanese language Japanese, 2 Languages attested from the 17th century