A Grammar Of The Japanese Written Language

Excerpt from A Grammar of the Japanese Written Language But even in this early stage it was occasionally found necessary to give the Chinese characters a phonetic value, in order to write Japanese proper names of unknown or doubtful derivation, and other words or particles for which there were no convenient Chinese equivalents. Besides, in the case of poetry, nzana could only give the meaning, whereas with band, not only the meaning, but the precise words and particles used could be expressed, and consequently the metre rendered discernible. These causes gradually gave rise to a more extended use of the Chinese characters as mere phonetic signs. The poetry in the Koji/ei is written in leana, and in the Manyo's/zin, a collection of poems extending over the period from the fifth to the ninth century, a gradual increase in the proportion of phonetic signs is plainly observable. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This is a book about the structure, history and evolution of the Japanese language. The Japanese Language is a classic study of one of the world's most widely used but least understood languages. Emphasizing the richness and complexity of Japanese as well as its limitations, this fine book provides a lively discussion about the uniqueness of the Japanese language. The relationship of Japanese to other languages is not well understood even by native speakers, and Professor Kindaichi sets out to define it. He concludes that Japanese is indeed only remotely related to other world languages although it shares many features in common with the languages of mainland Asia. Japanese shares with those languages a rich and detailed vocabulary for natural phenomena and an unusually complex and accurate way of expressing social relationships. Moreover, its capability to absorb innovations from abroad easily matches or exceeds that of English or German. The author, after briefly discussing the unique isolation of the Japanese language, moves on to consider the varieties of ordinary speech--dialects, jargon, sex--and role-based distinctions, and the difference between informal, formal, and literary language. He then examines the structure of Japanese pronunciations, its rhythm, and accent. The longest section of the book is devoted to the variety of the vocabulary, what can and cannot be said in Japanese. Readers who are just beginning their own study of Japanese will find this section especially fascinating, for each point is backed by examples from literature and everyday speech. Kindaichi also investigates the so-called vagueness of Japanese and traces it to its source-the unusual sentence order. This book includes: The highly debated origins of the Japanese language. Dialects, jargon, sex and role-based distinctions. Differences between informal, formal, and literary language. Structure, rhythm, and accent of pronunciation. What can and cannot be said in Japanese.

This title explains the use of Japanese words such as wa, ga and mo looking at the rules and meanings of words in their literary forms.

Excerpt from A Grammar of the Japanese Written Language In its structure, the Japanese language possesses all the characteristics of the Turanian family. It is in the main an agglutinative language, that is to say, the roots of words suffer no change, and the results which are obtained in European languages by inflection are arrived at in Japanese by the use of separate particles suffixed to the root. Like the other languages of this family, Japanese has no formative prefixes such as the German Ge, or the reduplication of the perfect in Latin and Greek verbs. Its poverty in conjunctions and copious use of participles instead is another point of resemblance. The Japanese language is further an example of the rule common to all languages of this family, that every word which serves to define another word invariably precedes it. Thus the adjective precedes the noun, the adverb the verb, the genitive the word which governs it, the objective case the verb, and the word governed by a preposition the preposition. The number of vocables common to Japanese with its kindred tongues is much smaller than might have been expected. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Starting at the very basics and working its way up to important language constructions, "An introduction to Japanese" offers beginning students, as well as those doing self-study, a comprehensive grammar for the Japanese language. Oriented towards the serious learner, there are no shortcuts in this book: no romanised Japanese for ease of reading beyond the introduction, no pretending that Japanese grammar maps perfectly to English grammar, and no simplified terminology. In return, this book explains Japanese the way one may find it taught at universities, covering everything from basic to intermediary Japanese, and even touching on some of the more advanced constructions.

The Book of Japanese Language is the combination of four parts in one with the aim of gathering in a single volume the necessary knowledge so that any student of Japanese can organically learn the grammatical rules of the language, the most common words, and at the same time be able to consult the great majority of grammatical forms that are used in Japanese on a daily basis.The four parts of the book are Vocabulary, Grammar Explanations, Expressing Yourself in Japanese, and Grammar Dictionary. In Vocabulary, you will find the most common Japanese words with detailed explanations. In Grammar Explanations, you will find the most important conjugations and grammatical forms along with examples to help you understand them. Expressing Yourself in Japanese lists these grammatical forms according to their usage. Finally, in Grammar Dictionary you can find summarized explanations of most Japanese grammatical forms ordered alphabetically.