Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics.pdf

Dictionary of language and linguistics 606JJacaltecMayan languagesJapaneseOfficial language of Japan, spoken by over 120 million speakers. Its genetic affinity isunclear; a relationship with Korean and the Altaic languages as well as with Malayo-Polynesian is often suggested. Ryukyu, the language of Okinawa, is closely related toJapanese. Japanese has many dialects; the standard is based on the dialect of Tokyo.Written documents date from the eighth century. The writing system of modernJapanese is a combination of the Chinese logographic writing Kanji (for expressinglexical morphemes) and two independent syllabaries, Hiragana, originally a writingsystem for women, now used, among other things, for marking grammatical morphemesand functional words, and Katakana, now used, among other things, for foreign words. Anormalized writing system in the Latin alphabet, Romaji, also exists. The syllabariescontain forty-six characters each; in everyday language about 2,000 Kanji characters areused.Characteristics: relatively simple sound system and syllable structure, but numerousmorphophonemic alternations (palatalization, affrication). Musical stress. Morphologicaltype: agglutinating. Rich verbal inflection (tense, aspect, mood, voice, negation,politeness. but no agreement). No number distinction; in number constructions,classifiers are employed. Numerous ‘cases’ are indicated by postpositions. The topic ismarked by the postposition -wa and does not have to be an argument of the verb; this ledto the erroneously named ‘double subject’ sentences such as sakana wa tai ga ii ‘fish-TOP red snapper-SUBJ good’ (= ‘As far as fish are concerned, red snappers taste good’).Nominal sentential elements can often be omitted if the reference is clear from thecontext (so-called ‘zero anaphors’); one result of this is that pronouns are rarely used andcan be derived from nouns, for which numerous forms are available for marking socialposition. Word order SOV; dependent clauses marked by participial forms of the verb.ReferencesChoi, S. 1993. Japanese/Korean linguistics, vol. 3. Chicago, IL.