Japonic languages


The Japonic, or Japanese–Ryukyuan, language family includes the Japanese language, spoken in the main islands of Japan, and the Ryukyuan languages, spoken in the Ryukyu Islands. The family is universally accepted by linguists, and significant progress has been made in reconstructing the proto-language. The reconstruction implies a split between all dialects of Japanese and all Ryukyuan varieties, probably before the 7th century. The Hachijō language, spoken on the Izu Islands, is also included, but its position within the family is unclear. There is also some fragmentary evidence suggesting that Japonic languages may once have been spoken in central and southern parts of the Korean peninsula.
Possible genetic relationships with many other language families have been proposed, most systematically with Korean, but none have been conclusively demonstrated.

Classification

The extant Japonic languages comprise two well-defined branches: Japanese and Ryukyuan. An alternative classification, based mainly on the development of the pitch accent, groups the highly divergent Kagoshima dialects of southwestern Kyushu with Ryukyuan in a Southwestern branch.
Most scholars believe that Japonic was brought to northern Kyushu from the Korean peninsula around 700 to 300 BC by wet-rice farmers of the Yayoi culture and spread throughout the Japanese archipelago, replacing indigenous languages. Somewhat later, Japonic languages also spread southward to the Ryukyu Islands. There is fragmentary placename evidence that now-extinct Japonic languages were still spoken in central and southern parts of the Korean peninsula several centuries later.

Japanese

Japanese is the national language of Japan, where it is spoken by about 126 million people. The oldest attestation is Old Japanese, which was recorded by Chinese characters in the 7th and 8th centuries.
It differed from Modern Japanese in having a simple V syllable structure and avoiding vowel sequences. The script also distinguished eight vowels, with two each corresponding to modern i, e and o. Most of the texts reflect the speech of the area around Nara, the capital, but over 300 poems were written in eastern dialects of Old Japanese.
The language experienced a massive influx of Sino-Japanese vocabulary after the introduction of Buddhism in the 6th century and peaking with the wholesale importation of Chinese culture in the 8th and the 9th centuries. The loanwords now account for about half the lexicon. They also affected the sound system of the language by adding compound vowels, syllable-final nasals, and geminate consonants, which became separate morae.
Modern mainland Japanese dialects, spoken on Honshu, Kyushu, Shikoku, and Hokkaido, are generally grouped as follows:
The early capitals of Nara and Kyoto lay within the western area, and their Kansai dialect retained its prestige and influence long after the capital was moved to Edo in 1603. Indeed, the Tokyo dialect has several western features not found in other eastern dialects.
The Hachijō language, spoken on Hachijō-jima and the Daitō Islands, including Aogashima, is highly divergent and varied. It has a mix of conservative features inherited from Eastern Old Japanese and influences from modern Japanese, making it difficult to classify. Hachijō is an endangered language, with a small population of elderly speakers.

Ryukyuan

The Ryukyuan languages were originally and traditionally spoken throughout the Ryukyu Islands, an island arc stretching between the southern Japanese island of Kyushu and the island of Taiwan. Most of them are considered "definitely" or "critically endangered" because of the spread of mainland Japanese.
Since Old Japanese displayed several innovations that are not shared with Ryukyuan, the two branches must have separated before the 7th century. The move from Kyushu to the Ryukyus may have occurred later and possibly coincided with the rapid expansion of the agricultural Gusuku culture in the 10th and 11th centuries. Such a date would explain the presence in Proto-Ryukyuan of Sino-Japanese vocabulary borrowed from Early Middle Japanese. After the migration to the Ryukyus, there was limited influence from mainland Japan until the conquest of the Ryukyu Kingdom by the Satsuma Domain in 1609.
Ryukyuan varieties are considered dialects of Japanese in Japan but have little intelligibility with Japanese or even among one another. They are divided into northern and southern groups, corresponding to the physical division of the chain by the 250 km-wide Miyako Strait.
Northern Ryukyuan languages are spoken in the northern part of the chain, including the major Amami and Okinawa Islands. They form a single dialect continuum, with mutual unintelligibility between widely-separated varieties. The major varieties are, from northeast to southwest:
There is no agreement on the subgrouping of the varieties. One proposal has three subgroups, with the central "Kunigami" branch comprising varieties from Southern Amami to Northern Okinawan, based on similar vowel systems and patterns of lenition of stops. Pellard suggests a binary division based on shared innovations, with an Amami group including the varieties from Kikai to Yoron, and an Okinawa group comprising the varieties of Okinawa and smaller islands to its west.
Southern Ryukyuan languages are spoken in the southern part of the chain, the Sakishima Islands. They comprise three distinct dialect continua:
The southern Ryukyus were settled by Japonic-speakers from the northern Ryukyus in the 13th century, leaving no linguistic trace of the indigenous inhabitants of the islands.

Peninsular Japonic

There is fragmentary evidence suggesting that now-extinct Japonic languages were spoken in the central and southern parts of the Korean peninsula:
Vovin calls these languages Peninsular Japonic and groups Japanese and Ryukyuan as Insular Japonic.

Proposed external relationships

According to Shirō Hattori, more attempts have been made to link Japanese with other language families than for any other language. None of the attempts has succeeded in demonstrating a common descent for Japonic and any other language family.
The most systematic comparisons have involved Korean, which has a very similar grammatical structure to Japanese. Samuel Elmo Martin, John Whitman, and others have proposed hundreds of possible cognates, with sound correspondences. However, Alexander Vovin points out that Old Japanese contains several pairs of words of similar meaning in which one word matches a Korean form, and the other is also found in Ryukyuan and Eastern Old Japanese. He thus suggests that to eliminate early loans from Korean, Old Japanese morphemes should not be assigned a Japonic origin unless they are also attested in Southern Ryukyuan or Eastern Old Japanese. That procedure leaves fewer than a dozen possible cognates, which may have been borrowed by Korean from Peninsular Japonic.

Typology

Most Japonic languages have voicing opposition for obstruents, with exceptions such as the Miyako dialect of Ōgami. Glottalized consonants are common in North Ryukyuan languages but are rarer in South Ryukyuan.
Proto-Japonic had only voiceless obstruents, like Ainu and proto-Korean.
Japonic languages also resemble Ainu and modern Korean in having a single liquid consonant phoneme.
A five-vowel system like Standard Japanese,,, and is common, but some Ryukyuan languages also have central vowels and, and Yonaguni has only,, and.
In most Japonic languages, speech rhythm is based on a subsyllabic unit, the mora. Each syllable has a basic mora of the form V but a nasal coda, geminate consonant, or lengthened vowel counts as an additional mora. However, some dialects in northern Honshu or southern Kyushu have syllable-based rhythm.
Like Ainu, Middle Korean, and some modern Korean dialects, most Japonic varieties have a lexical pitch accent, which governs whether the moras of a word are pronounced high or low, but it follows widely-different patterns. In Tokyo-type systems, the basic pitch of a word is high, with an accent marking the position of a drop to low pitch. In Kyushu dialects, the basic pitch is low, with accented syllables given high pitch, and in Kyoto-type systems, both types are used.
Japonic languages, again like Ainu and Korean, are left-branching, with a basic subject–object–verb word order, modifiers before nouns, and postpositions. There is a clear distinction between verbs, which have extensive infectional morphology, and nominals, which have no inflection.

Proto-Japonic

The proto-language of the family has been reconstructed by using a combination of internal reconstruction from Old Japanese and by applying the comparative method to Old Japanese and Ryukyuan. The major reconstructions of the 20th century were produced by Samuel Elmo Martin and Shirō Hattori.

Phonology

Proto-Japonic words are generally polysyllabic, with syllables having the form V. The following proto-Japonic consonant inventory is generally agreed upon, except for the values of and :
BilabialAlveolarPalatalVelar
Nasal
Stop
Fricative
Approximant
Liquid

It is agreed that the Old Japanese voiced consonants b, d, z and g, which never occurred word-initially, are derived from clusters of nasals and voiceless consonants. In most cases, the two consonants were brought together by loss of an intervening vowel. A few words display no evidence for a former vowel, and scholars reconstruct a syllable-final nasal of indeterminate place preceding the voiceless obstruent, as in > tubu 'grain', > piza 'knee'. These nasals are unrelated to the moraic nasal of later forms of Japonic, which derive from contractions or borrowings from other languages such as Chinese.
The other Old Japanese consonants are projected back to Proto-Japonic except that authors disagree on whether the sources of Old Japanese w and y should be reconstructed as glides and or as voiced stops and respectively, based on Ryukyuan reflexes:
Many authors, including advocates of a genetic relationship with Korean and other northeast-Asian languages, argue that Southern Ryukyuan initial and Yonaguni are retentions of Proto-Japonic voiced stops and that became and elsewhere through a process of lenition. However, many linguists, especially in Japan, prefer the opposite hypothesis, namely that Southern Ryukyuan initial and Yonaguni are derived from local innovations in which Proto-Japonic and underwent fortition. The case for lenition of - > - is substantially weaker, with the fortition hypothesis supported by Sino-Japonic words with Middle Chinese initials in also having reflexes of initial in Yonaguni, such as dasai from Middle Chinese 野菜. Further evidence is provided by an entry in the late-15th-century Korean annal Seongjong Taewang Sillok recording the local name of the island of Yonaguni in Idu script as 閏伊是麼, which has the Middle Korean reading zjuni sima, with sima glossed in the text as the Japonic word for 'island'. That is direct evidence of an intermediate stage of the fortition - > - > -, leading to the modern name 'Yonaguni'.
Most authors accept six Proto-Japonic vowels:
FrontCentralBack
Close
Mid
Open

The vowels,, and have been obtained by internal reconstruction from Old Japanese, with the other Old Japanese vowels derived from vowel clusters. The mid vowels and are required to account for Ryukyuan correspondences. In Old Japanese, they were raised to i and u respectively except word-finally. They have also left some traces in eastern Old Japanese dialects and are also found in some early mokkan and in some modern Japanese dialects.
Proto-JaponicProto-RyukyuanOld Japanese
i1
i1
u
u
o2
a

The other vowels of Old Japanese are believed to derive from sequences of vowels in Proto-Japanese, with different reflexes in Ryukyuan and Eastern Old Japanese:
Proto-JaponicProto-RyukyuanOld JapaneseEastern Old Japanese
i2i
i2 i
e2e
e1e
e1a
o1o1
o1o1

In most cases, Proto-Japonic corresponds to Old Japanese i2. Proto-Japonic is reconstructed for Old Japanese e2 in the few cases that it alternates with o2. Some authors propose a high central vowel to account for these alternations, but there is no evidence for it in Ryukyuan or Eastern Old Japanese. The reasons for the alternate reflex e2 are unclear, but its occurrences seem to be limited to specific single-mora roots such as se~so2 'back', me2~mo2 'seaweed', and possibly ye~yo2 'handle'.
The Japanese pitch accent is usually not recorded in the Old Japanese script. The oldest description of the accent, in the 12th-century dictionary Ruiju Myōgishō, defined accent classes that generally account for correspondences between modern mainland Japanese dialects. However, Ryukyuan languages share a set of accent classes that cut across them. For example, for two-syllable words, the Ruiju Myōgishō defines five accent classes, which are reflected in different ways in the three major accent systems of mainland Japanese, here represented by Kyoto, Tokyo, and Kagoshima. In each case, the pattern of high and low pitches is shown across both syllables and a following neutral particle. Ryukyuan languages, here represented by Kametsu, show a three-way division, which partially cuts across the five mainland classes.
In some Ryukyuan dialects, including Shuri, subclass is marked by a long vowel in the first syllable instead of a distinct pitch pattern, which led Hattori to suggest that the original distinction was one vowel length.

Pronouns

The following personal pronouns can be reconstructed for Proto-Japonic, based on Old Japanese and Ryukyuan data.
The form, which may have been borrowed from Koreanic, yielded an ambivalent personal pronoun in Japanese, a second-person pronoun in Northern Ryukyuan, and a reflexive pronoun in Southern Ryukyuan.
The following interrogative pronouns can be reconstructed for Proto-Japonic.
The question particle was.
The following demonstrative pronouns can be reconstructed for Proto-Japonic.
The daughter languages later innovated a mesial, causing a split within the demonstrative system. Eventually, proximal was lost and replaced by. Distal eventually became mesial, and, which was apophonic to the newly-replaced proximal, became the distal pronoun in all modern languages. Proto-Ryukyuan later replaced with, which was unrelated.

Vocabulary

The Proto-Japonic numerals are:

Works cited

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