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In Japan, the practice was developed into man'yōgana, a complete script for the language that used Chinese characters phonetically, which was the ancestor of modern kana syllabaries. [16] This system was already in use in the verse parts of the Kojiki (712) and the Nihon Shoki (720).
Kanji is the term for adopted Chinese characters used in written Japanese. The Chinese writing system influenced spoken Japanese language first and thus "provided key vehicles for intellectual creativity". [3] Its origin in Japan dates back to the Kofun period, and its introduction is believed to be between 300 and 710 AD. [12]
Top to bottom: 倭; wō in regular, clerical and small seal scripts Wa [a] is the oldest attested name of Japan [b] and ethnonym of the Japanese people.From c. the 2nd century AD Chinese and Korean scribes used the Chinese character 倭; 'submissive', 'distant', 'dwarf' to refer to the various inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago, although it might have been just used to transcribe the ...
The earliest historical linguistic evidence of the spoken Chinese language dates back approximately 4500 years, [1] while examples of the writing system that would become written Chinese are attested in a body of inscriptions made on bronze vessels and oracle bones during the Late Shang period (c. 1250 – 1050 BCE), [2] [3] with the very oldest dated to c. 1200 BCE.
Japonic: spoken mainly in Japan. Major Japonic languages include Japanese, Ryukyuan, and Hachijo. Ainu: spoken mainly in Japan. The only surviving Ainu language is Hokkaido Ainu. Core languages of the East Asian cultural sphere are predominantly Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, and their respective variants.
Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese readers of Literary Chinese each use distinct systems of pronunciation specific to their own languages. Japanese speakers have readings of Chinese origin called on'yomi for many words, such as for "ginko" (銀行) or "Tokyo" (東京), but use kun'yomi when the kanji represents a native word such as the reading ...
Early Middle Japanese (中古日本語, Chūko-Nihongo) [1] is a stage of the Japanese language between 794 and 1185, which is known as the Heian period (平安時代). The successor to Old Japanese ( 上代日本語 ), it is also known as Late Old Japanese .
Ancient China's enormous political and economic influence in the region had a deep effect on Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and other Asian languages in East and Southeast Asia throughout history, in a manner somewhat similar to the preeminent position that Greek and Latin had in European history.