Outlines of modern Japanese linguistics

187 Pages·1966·5.667 MB·English

by  Tetsuo Harada

OUTLINES OF
MODERN
JAPANESE
LINGUISTICS
Tetsuo Harada,
Associate Professor of English,
Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan
PRINTED BY
TATESHINA PRINTING COMPANY, LTD.
FOR
NIHON UNIVERSITY
1966
First printing November 1966
This book has been published on a Nihon
University publication grant for 1966.
Any communication regarding the book should be addressed to the
author in care of Department of Humanities, Nihon University
(School of Dentistry), Kanda-Surugadai, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, Japan.
© Tetsuo Harada, 1966
r;;
f The Library
University of Regina
PREFACE
The author hopefully believes that the appearance of a book of this kind
needs no apology. Although there are in existence a large number of useful
grammars, phrase-books and conversational guides of the Japanese language,
they are mainly compiled for the benefit of tourists, commercial people and
military servicemen to aid them in their daily intercourse with the natives
during their necessarily brief term of stay in the country.
On the other hand, any serious student of Japanese is soon balked in his effort
by the lack of reliable reference books when his knowledge of the language
has progressed sufficiently to tackle with the subtle linguistic points. During
the past three decades we have witnessed an increasing number of American
and European students who make a serious study of, or research in, various
socio-historical phenomena of the Far East, ranging from the sociology,
anthropology, family relationship, arts, literature to general culture. Through
his constant association with the foreign students of things Japanese, the
author has been aware of a long-felt need expressed on their part for some
kind of a reliable introductory book to acquaint them with a comprehensive
view of the Japanese language in all its essential features. However, with the
exception of a few learned treatises dealing with some specific aspects of
Japanese such as its phonology or morphology chiefly published in the United
States, there is no book as yet to the knowledge of the author which is con­
cerned with an overall treatment of Japanese.
The present work is a humble attempt to fill this need till a work by more
competent hand will supplant it and, for this reason, it is addressed to the
general students of the Far Eastern cultures rather than to a few select lin­
guists. Therefore, matters of controversial character have been purposely
excluded, and in order to be of service to the students uninitiated in the so­
phisticated jargons of modern linguistics, the book is divested of what is too
technical or of interest only to specialists.
Since this is not a formal grammar of the Japanese language nor a primer to
give the beginning students its working knowledge, the discussion of Japanese
syntax has been excluded except for sporadic references here and there in con­
nection with the morphology. For an excellent presentation of Japanese
syntax, the interested readers are referred to Bernard Bloch’s Studies in Col­
loquial Japanese 11: Syntax (Language 22, Linguistic Society of America,
1946), a work written with a heavy structuralistic slant. In a book of an
elementary character, it is impossible to clearly distinguish between the au­
thor’s own material and those accumulated by the linguistic scholarship at
large. To supplement his knowledge and experience gained from some
VI PREFACE
twenty years’ study of the Japanese and other languages of Asia, the author
has freely drawn on the authoritative books, both native and foreign. Some
of the principal books consulted are listed in a bibliography attached to the
end of the book.
The author is only too conscious of his limitations to do full justice to a sys­
tematic presentation of Japanese linguistics but he trusts that parts dealing
with the classification of Japanese verbs will be found to be an improvement
on what has been customarily described in Japanese primers designed for the
foreign students.
The author owes a great debt of gratitude to Drs. Yasuo Yamato and Kotaro
Ishibashi, Department of English Language and Literature, Nihon Univer­
sity, for their valuable criticism of his manuscript. It is largely to their credit
that much improvement has been introduced and errors pruned of it but for
any factual error or divergence of opinions the author alone is responsible.
Thanks are also extended to his friends who have been directly and indirectly
concerned with the genesis of this book: Dean Masaru Suzuki, Professor
Kazuo Nagai, Dr. Marvin E. Mundel, Mr. Tadao lida and Miss Tamae
Nakane, the last two of whom were good enough to undertake the preparation
of an index.
The author is heartily grateful to the central authorities of Nihon University
for granting him a subsidy to bear the publication expense involved. Finally,
if this book should prove of service to the interested students and intelligent
readers who aspire for better international understanding, the author feels his
labors will be amply rewarded.
Setagaya, Tokyo, 1965
Tetsuo Harada
PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION AND CONVENTIONAL ABBREVIATIONS
1. The transliteration of Japanese words and sentences cited is made through­
out by the Hepburn Romanized System, as it is the one most widely used by
the foreign students. This system was first constructed by the Rev. James
C. Hepburn (1815-1911), an American Presbyterian missionary, who had
resided in Japan from 1859 to 1892. This system transcribes the Japanese
/?-sound as the /-sound, thus Mt. Fuji instead of Mt. Huji which is actually
pronounced by the native speakers of Japanese. In this book the /z-sound is
occasionally written as such when intended to draw attention to it.
2. The five Japanese cardinal vowels /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/ are pronounced with
the Italian values. The pronunciations of consonants can be approximated
to those of English sounds, though the peculiarities of Japanese sounds are
discussed in pertinent places.
3. These five vowels are written with the macron or horizontal bar (-) placed
on top of them to indicate their long quality.
E.g.
a To be pronounced as in Eng. arm
e To be pronounced as in Fr. tete
i To be pronounced as in Eng. heat
6 To be pronounced as in Ger. Boot
u To be pronounced as in Eng .food
4. For the discussion of foreign sounds other than Japanese, they are des­
cribed by means of IPA phonetic symbols.
5. The foreign loan-words in Japanese are written in this book in italics to
separate them from the English text.
6. Certain principles operative in the morphology of Japanese, particularly
sound changes contingent upon the inflection of nouns and adjectives, are
incapable of being fully understood from the Romanized transliteration of
the forms involved, unless a person possesses a certain degree of working
knowledge of the Japanese scriptorial practice.
7. The conventional abbreviations and signs used in the linguistic work are
as follows.
Chin. Chinese
Dut. Dutch
Eng. English
Ger. German
Gk. Greek
Jap. Japanese
Lat. Latin
Sansk., San. Sanskrit
Port. Portuguese
viii PHONETIC transcription and conventional abbreviations
Sp. Spanish
cf confer (compare)
e e exampli gratia (for example)
i e id est (that is, namely)
< means ‘derived from’ or ‘traceable to .
means ‘develops into’ or ‘becomes .
I between forms indicates alternation or
equivalence, thus d/t.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1 LINGUISTIC BACKGROUND OF JAPANESE
1. Comparative Philology and Linguistic Classification .......... 1
2. Linguistic Features of Japanese................................................ 12
3. The Genealogical Kinship of Japanese..................................... 15
Claim for Aino-Japanese kinship..................................... 16
Claims for southern genesis of Japanese......................... 18
Claims for northern genesis of Japanese......................... 23
4. Races and Languages ................................................................ 30 •
CHAPTER 11 PHONEMIC SYSTEM OF JAPANESE
5. Phonetics and the Articulatory Organs..................................... 32
6. Classification of the Speech-sounds ......................................... 35
7. Sounds of Japanese Speech .................................................... 39
8. Vowels in Japanese .................................................................... 42
9. Consonants in Japanese ............................................................ 46
i. S and Z, ii. T and D, iii. Japanese liquid (R), iv. Japanese
semi-vowels, vi. Contraction of double consonants
10. Variations of Speech-sounds .................................................... 50
11. Accentual and Stress Patterns in Japanese ............................. 52
12. Phonetic Changes in Japanese ................................................. 56
A. Isolative phonetic changes
i. Loss of syllables................................................................ 57
ii. Interchange of sounds ..................................................... 57
iii. Assibilation........................................................................ 58
B. Combinative phonetic changes
i. Voicing phenomenon........................................................ 58
ii. Epenthesis ........................................................................ 59
iii. Transformation of sounds ............................................. 59
iv. Euphonic change (no-bin) ............................................. 60
CHAPTER 111 JAPANESE SCRIPTS
13. Origin and Development of the Alphabetic System .............. 63
14. Composition of Chinese Characters......................................... 65
15. The Introduction of Chinese Scripts into Japan..................... 67
16. The Indigenous Development of Kana Characters ............. 68
17. Romanization of Japanese ........................................................ 70
IX
X
CHAPTER IV THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN STANDARD
JAPANESE
18. Glottochronology of Japanese ................................................. 73
19. Japanese dialects ........................................................................ 75
20. Non-local Varieties .................................................................... 79
21. Modern Standard Japanese........................................................ 80
CHAPTER V THE MORPHOLOGY OF MODERN JAPANESE
22. Written and Spoken Japanese ................................................. 84
23. Grammatical Concept and Classificatory Scheme in Japanese 85
24. Honorific System (keigo) ........................................................ 88
25. Nouns (meishi)............................................................................ 90
i. Case................................................................................... 90
ii. Number ............................................................................ 92
iii. Gender................................................................................ 92
26. Pronouns (<daimeishi) ................................................................ 93
i. Personal and possessive pronouns ................................. 93
ii. Demonstrative pronouns ................................................. 94
iii. Interrogative pronouns.................................................... 95
27. Verbs (doshi)................................................................................ 95
i. Verbs of first conjugation class ..................................... 96
ii. Verbs of second conjugation class ................................. 97
iii. Formation of tenses ........................................................ 97
iv. Negative conjugation........................................................ 99
v. Passive voice .................................................................... 100
vi. Mood ................................................................................ 103
28. Copula ........................................................................................ 106
29. Auxiliary Verbs (jodoshi) ........................................................ 107
30. Adjectives (keiyoshi) ................................................................ 108
i. Adjectives proper ............................................................ 108
ii. Predicating adjectives ..................................................... 109
iii. Comparison of adjectives................................................. 110
31. Numerals .................................................................................... Ill
32. Numerative Classifiers................................................................ 115
33. Adverbs (fukushi)........................................................................ 117
34. Conjunctions (setsuzokushi) ..................................................... 119
35. Auxiliary Particles (joji) ............................................................ 119
i. Casal particles (kaku-joji) ................................................. 120
ii. Conjunctive particles (setsuzoku-joji) ............................. 121
iii. Governing particles (kakari-joji) ..................................... 122
xi
iv. Adverbial particles (fuku-joji) ......................................... 123
v. Interrogative particles (gimon-joji) ................................. 124
36. Interjections (kantoshi)................................................................ 125
CHAPTER VI THE JAPANESE VOCABULARY
37. Words ........................................................................................ 128
38. Structure of Japanese Words..................................................... 129
39. Semantic Changes........................................................................ 134
40. Onomatopes ../.......................................................................... 135
41. Neologisms ................................................................................ 137
42. Japanese Dictionaries ................................................................ 139
CHAPTER VII FOREIGN LOAN-WORDS IN JAPANESE
43. General Considerations ............................................................ 141
44. Chinese Elements in Japanese ................................................. 143
45. Portuguese Elements in Japanese ............................................. 148
46. Dutch Elements in Japanese ..................................................... 149
47. English Elements in Japanese ................................................. 150
48. French Elements in Japanese..................................................... 151
49. German Elements in Japanese ................................................. 152
50. Behavior of Foreign Words in Japanese ......................... 152
i. Phonological aspect ......................................................... 153
ii. Morphological aspect with semantic changes .............. 155
CHAPTER VIII PRESENT LANGUAGE PROBLEMS IN JAPAN
51. The Reduction of Characters and Spelling Simplification.... 156
52. The Present State of Japanese Language Study ..................... 159
53. Summary .................................................................................... 161
Selective Bibliography
Index