Jōdai Tokushu Kanazukai
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is an archaic kana orthography system used to write
Old Japanese is the oldest attested stage of the Japanese language, recorded in documents from the Nara period (8th century). It became Early Middle Japanese in the succeeding Heian period, but the precise delimitation of the stages is controversial. Old Ja ...
during the
Nara period The of the history of Japan covers the years from 710 to 794. Empress Genmei established the capital of Heijō-kyō (present-day Nara). Except for a five-year period (740–745), when the capital was briefly moved again, it remained the capita ...
. Its primary feature is to distinguish between two groups of syllables that later merged. The existence and meaning of this system is a critical point of scholarly debate in the study of the history of the Japanese language.


Syllables

The following are the syllabic distinctions made in
Old Japanese is the oldest attested stage of the Japanese language, recorded in documents from the Nara period (8th century). It became Early Middle Japanese in the succeeding Heian period, but the precise delimitation of the stages is controversial. Old Ja ...
. Those syllables marked in gray are known as .


Transcription

The two groups merged by the 9th century. It predates the development of
kana are syllabary, syllabaries used to write Japanese phonology, Japanese phonological units, Mora (linguistics), morae. In current usage, ''kana'' most commonly refers to ''hiragana'' and ''katakana''. It can also refer to their ancestor , wh ...
, and the phonetic difference is unclear. Therefore, an ad hoc transcription system is employed. Syllables written with subscript 1 are known as type and those with subscript 2 as type (these are the first two
celestial stem The ten Heavenly Stems (or Celestial Stems) are a system of ordinals indigenous to China and used throughout East Asia, first attested during the Shang dynasty as the names of the ten days of the week. They were also used in Shang-era ritual ...
s, and are used for such numbering in Japanese). There are several competing transcription systems. One popular system places a diaeresis above the vowel: ï, ë, ö. This typically represents i2, e2, and o2, and assumes that unmarked i, e, and o are i1, e1, and o1. It does not necessarily have anything to do with pronunciation. There are several problems with this system. * It implies a particular pronunciation, indirectly on the vowel. * It neglects to distinguish between words where the distinction is not clear, such as the /to/ in /toru/ as well as in /kaditori/. *It implies the unmarked Type A form is the pronunciation of syllables which do not distinguish Type A vs Type B, such as si or po. (These non-distinguishing syllables are sometimes known as Type C (丙 ''hei''), to keep them separate from both Type A and Type B.) Another system uses superscripts instead of subscripts. The "Yale System" writes the type A vowels i1, e1, o1 as yi, ye, wo, and writes i2, e2, o2 as iy, ey, . When vowels lack the Type A vs. Type B distinction they are given unmodified spellings (i e o). Consequently, the type C syllables are distinguishable from both A and B type without any presumption of which, if any, of the other types they shared pronunciations with. These spellings are despite their appearance not intended as reconstructions, but as abstract notations that represent Old Japanese spelling without any commitment to the pronunciation.


Meaning

There are many hypotheses to explain the distinction. However, it is not clear whether the distinction applied to the consonant, vowel, or something else. There is no general academic agreement.


Usage

A word is consistently, without exception, written with syllables from a specific group. For example, /kami1/ "above" and /kami2/ "god". While both words end in /mi/ in later Japanese, mi1 cannot substitute for mi2 or vice versa. This strict distinction exists for all of the syllables marked in gray. This usage is also found in the verb morphology. The quadrigrade conjugation is as follows: The
verb A verb is a word that generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual description of English, the basic f ...
/sak-/ "bloom" has quadrigrade conjugation class. Thus, its conjugation is as follows: Before the discovery, it was thought that quadrigrade realis and imperative shared the same form: -e. However, after the discovery, it became clear that realis was -e2 while imperative was -e1. Also, has a profound effect on etymology. It was once thought that /kami/ "above" and /kami/ "god" shared the same etymology, a god being an entity high above. However, after the discovery, it is known that "above" is /kami1/ while "god" is /kami2/. Thus, they are distinct words.


Man'yōgana chart

The following chart lists syllable and
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 t ...
correspondences.


Development

The distinction between /mo1/ and /mo2/ is only made in the oldest text: ''
Kojiki The , also sometimes read as or , is an early Japanese chronicle of myths, legends, hymns, genealogies, oral traditions, and semi-historical accounts down to 641 concerning the origin of the Japanese archipelago, the , and the Japanese imperia ...
''. After that, they merged into /mo/. In later texts, confusion between types A and B can be seen. Nearly all of the A/B distinctions had vanished by the
Classical Japanese The , also called and 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 d ...
period. As seen in early
Heian Period The is the last division of classical Japanese history, running from 794 to 1185. It followed the Nara period, beginning when the 50th emperor, Emperor Kammu, moved the capital of Japan to Heian-kyō (modern Kyoto). means in Japanese. It is a ...
texts such as ''
Kogo Shūi is a historical record of the Inbe clan of Japan written in the early Heian period (794–1185). It was composed by (斎部広成) in 807 using material transmitted orally over several generations of the Imbe clan, Inbe clan. Background Histor ...
'', the final syllables to be distinguished were /ko1, go1/ and /ko2, go2/. After the merger, CV1 and CV2 became CV.


See also

* ''
Kogo Shūi is a historical record of the Inbe clan of Japan written in the early Heian period (794–1185). It was composed by (斎部広成) in 807 using material transmitted orally over several generations of the Imbe clan, Inbe clan. Background Histor ...
'', an 807 text that maintains several historical phonetic distinctions * '' Tōdaiji Fujumonkō'', a text that maintains the /ko1, ko2/ distinction


Bibliography

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Jodai Tokushu Kanazukai Nara period Japanese writing system Kanji Kana Archaic Japanese language * Japanese orthography