Page 14 - Basic Japanese

About the Japanese Language

The origins of the Japanese language are incompletely
known, and multiple theories have been proposed over the

past few centuries connecting Japanese to North Asian
languages, South Asian Languages, and languages in other
areas. Currently, it is thought that the strongest theory

among them is one of the North Asian ones, which places
Japanese with Altaic languages such as Turkish and

Mongolian based on the typological similarities, for example,
sequential suffixation (agglutinating morphology), Subject-

Object-Verb order, and vowel harmony in native vocabulary.
Around the fourth and the fifth centuries AD, Chinese

characters and vocabulary started to be brought to Japan.
The Japanese developed man’yōgana, in which a limited set of
kanji were used to write Japanese words with their phonetic

contribution. Eventually, in the Heian Period (794–1185),
hiragana and katakana were developed from some of the

kanji characters included in man’yōgana. Most content words,
such as nouns, adjectives, and verbs, have a Chinese origin

due to the strong influence of China in history. However,
modern Japanese also includes an increasing number of loan

words from English. The Japanese language is obviously
extremely complex in terms of its lexicon and writing

systems, but its unique structural features also surprise
many speakers of English. The following are only some of its

unique features.

Word order and particles