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The original language of Japan, or at least the original language of a certain population that was ancestral to a significant portion of the historical and present Japanese nation, was the so-called yamato kotoba (大和言葉 or infrequently 大和詞, i.e. "Yamato words"), which in scholarly contexts is sometimes referred to as wago (和語 ...
Japanese is the de facto national language of Japan, where it is spoken by about 126 million people. The oldest attestation is Old Japanese, which was recorded using Chinese characters in the 7th and 8th centuries. [13] It differed from Modern Japanese in having a simple (C)V syllable structure and avoiding vowel sequences. [14]
Old Japanese (上代日本語, Jōdai Nihon-go) 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.
Japanese is the national and primary language of Japan. The language is a lexically distinct pitch-accent system. Early Japanese is known primarily by its state in the 8th century when the three major works of Old Japanese were compiled. The earliest attestation of the Japanese language was found in a Chinese document from 256 CE.
The Japanese language is Japan's de facto national language and the primary written and spoken language of most people in the country. [255] Japanese writing uses kanji (Chinese characters) and two sets of kana (syllabaries based on cursive script and radicals used by kanji), as well as the Latin alphabet and Arabic numerals. [256]
Classical Japanese began to be written during the Heian period, at which point it was very similar to spoken Japanese. It became the written standard for the Japanese language for many centuries, though the spoken language continued to evolve and by the Edo period was substantially different from classical Japanese. [2]
Nationalist politics in Japan sometimes exacerbated these tensions, such as denial of the Nanjing Massacre and other war crimes, [290] revisionist history textbooks, and visits by some Japanese politicians to Yasukuni Shrine, which commemorates Japanese soldiers who died in wars from 1868 to 1954, but also has included convicted war criminals ...
The significant use of Chinese characters in Japan first began to take hold around the 5th century AD and has since had a profound influence in shaping Japanese culture, language, literature, history, and records. [6] Inkstone artifacts at archaeological sites dating back to the earlier Yayoi period were also found to contain Chinese characters ...