What is the origin of Japanese?

The origin of Japanese has always been a controversial issue. Japanese in Meiji era classified Japanese as "Altaic language family", which was later denied. Homer Hubert and Xiao Ye King (? No Susumu) believes that Japanese belongs to the Dravidian language family, and Nishida Daxiong believes that Japanese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan Tibeto-Burman language family.

Christopher I. Beckwith thinks that Japanese belongs to the Japanese-Koguryo family, and Leon Angelo Serafim thinks that Japanese and Ryukyu can form the Japanese family. It is generally believed that Japanese was brought to the Japanese archipelago by the Yayoi people in the third century BC, and it was combined with the indigenous languages.

During the Three Kingdoms period, Chinese characters were introduced into Japan. In the Tang Dynasty, I invented a pen name that was popular among women. The official language is classical Chinese, so modern Japanese is greatly influenced by ancient Chinese. Take Showa 3 1 (1956) as an example. In Japanese vocabulary, Japanese accounts for 36.6% and Chinese accounts for 53.6%. In the 39th year of Showa (1964), the National Institute of Japan conducted a survey on 90 magazine terms and obtained Japanese.

The development of Japanese

Before the 3rd century A.D., Japan had only languages, but there were no words that could be used to record words and events. Everything is word of mouth.

At first, because it was in the Neolithic Age and the early slave society, the social scale was small and the communication between people was not close. The lack of writing has not brought great inconvenience to the Japanese.

However, after the middle period of slave society, with the development of social productive forces, there are more and more exchanges between people. Many things cannot be effectively solved by language alone, and people urgently need the birth of words. But it is not so easy to create a systematic text. The Japanese thought for a long time. Nor did they create words that satisfied them.

Until one day in the 3rd century AD, the monks of Baekje brought our Chinese characters from China to Japan. (This is recorded in the Japanese history books "Koji" and "Japanese Secretary")

After seeing Chinese characters, the Japanese decided to create their own characters and use them directly to write. It is not so easy for Japanese to borrow Chinese characters directly from China. Because the languages of Japan and China are not unified, many things can't be written directly in Chinese characters. The Japanese then began to try to express Japanese pronunciation with Chinese characters.

The specific way is to pronounce English words with Chinese characters, such as good, just like when we first started learning English words. In the morning, some students labeled it "Goodall moved you".

This is the earliest Japanese pseudonym-Ye Wan pseudonym.

It is called Ye Wan's pen name because the Japanese wrote a collection of poems and songs-Ye Wan Collection with the Chinese characters they learned. This collection of poems and songs may be unfamiliar to people in China. But for the Japanese, its status is very high. Its status is equivalent to China's The Book of Songs.

You may want to know how Japanese poetry is written in Chinese characters. Is it written like China's poems?

No, as mentioned above, Chinese characters are used to mark sounds. For example, the Japanese pronunciation of "mountain peak" is "やま" (later invented). The pronunciation of these two words is very close to the pronunciation of "flax" in Chinese, so the Japanese use our Chinese character "flax" to mean "mountain".

In this way, Ye Wan, the oldest Japanese poetry collection, was born. Because all Chinese characters are used in this collection of poems, these Chinese characters are also called "Wanye pen names".

Then why are these words called pseudonyms? From its literal meaning, we can know that "fake" here means "borrowing" and "name" means "word". The so-called "pseudonym" is the word "fake". The disadvantages of using, using and pinyin Chinese characters began to appear. That is to say, a pronunciation may have multiple Chinese characters, and a sentence may have multiple ways of writing, which leads to language confusion.

Later, as the Japanese learned more about our Chinese characters, they learned a lot about the pronunciation and meaning of our Chinese characters in China. The Japanese began to try to use the characteristics of Chinese characters as ideographs to correspond Chinese characters with their languages.

For example, the Japanese know that the "mountain" of the "mountain peak" is the same as the pronunciation of "やま" in their Japanese, and both represent the object of "mountain". So they use the Chinese character "Shan" as the pronunciation of "やま". This is also the source of Chinese pronunciation in Japanese.

Students who have studied Japanese will know that there is another way to pronounce Chinese characters in Japanese-pronunciation. Phonetic symbols are pronounced directly by the Japanese with the pronunciation of Chinese characters. For example, the pronunciation of "forest" in Japanese is "しんりん". Its Japanese pronunciation is very similar to that of "forest" in Chinese. As for why there are deviations, on the one hand, it is caused by poor imitation pronunciation, and on the other hand, it is because it is ancient China, and the pronunciation of ancient times is different from that of modern Chinese.

Of course, another important reason is that there are dialects in ancient China, and the pronunciation will be different in different places. Because the sources of Chinese characters introduced into Japan are different, the pronunciation of Japanese people will definitely be different. This is why when we study Japanese now, we often see that a Chinese character in Japanese may correspond to multiple pronunciations.

We in China are constantly simplifying and developing our Chinese characters. In the process of writing Chinese characters, the Japanese are also slowly writing their own style and simplifying Chinese characters. In fact, it can't be done without simplification. Those ancient Chinese characters in China are too difficult to write, and it is very troublesome to write.

In the process of simplifying Chinese characters, Japanese monks simplified Chinese characters into radicals of China's regular script. Later, it gradually evolved into the Japanese katakana we see now. Katakana was originally used only by men. Later, the maids in charge of copying in the Japanese imperial palace also simplified Chinese characters when recording, and created Hiragana in addition to Japanese cursive script.

Because in Japan at that time, court officials and monks had high status and belonged to the upper class, their simplified characters were quickly sought after and imitated by people, and gradually became popular and fixed among Japanese people.

Of course, many people in Japan like to write Chinese characters, and many Chinese characters have been preserved intact. Therefore, there are both Hiragana and Katakana as well as Chinese characters in modern Japanese. In addition, the Japanese also created Chinese characters with unique Japanese style by using pictophonetic characters and recognizing Chinese characters, such as Yi, Zhi and Zi. The above three words are all created by using the cognitive method of Chinese characters. For example, the word "Qi" means "crossroads".

Later, with the introduction of western culture into Japan, the Japanese also used Roman characters in the form of western letters. However, Roman characters are rarely used, mostly for signs and advertisements, and rarely for articles. As a result, the Japanese we are seeing now is a situation in which Hiragana, Katakana, Chinese characters and Roman characters stand in four pillars.

Refer to Baidu Encyclopedia-Japanese