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The Japanese language it’s spoken in Japan but recently many foreign people around the world are interested in this unique Asian language, being consider a Japonic language.
The linguists have three main theories about this language.
One theory sustain that the Japanese language has the origin in Korean and Chinese language with some other language family named Altaic, which include Mongolian, Turkish, Tungusic.
The second one is that the Japanese is an Austronesian language which include Papuan, Malayan and other Pacific languages
In addition, a third theory is said that the language is a Southeast Asian language which have include languages like Indian, Vietnamese, Tibetan and Burmese named Tamil language.
All these languages combined with the Western and European languages influence made the modern Japanese language today.
Because of the isolation of the Japan islands, the language combinations transform Japanese language in a unique one, become very different from the origin languages.
A major influence has the Chinese language, which introduced a new style of writing and thinking.
English combined with Portuguese and German, had a big contribution in the course of developing of this language with a new style of writing –katakana.
The Japanese language has many dialects: the Kansai Dialect of the Osaka/Kyoto/Kobe region of Western Japan, the Kyushu Dialect of Japan's southernmost main island, and the Tokyo Dialect of the Kanto Region, considered the standard dialect.
Japanese also includes an elaborate grammatical and a system of "honorifics," or rules of language to show respect according to social position, age etc. The “honorific” style differ as teineigo (丁寧語) (polite language),sonkeigo (尊敬語) (respectful language) and kenjougo (謙譲語) (humble language.)
The Chinese writing system was introduced in the 6th century concomitant with the Chinese culture providing the Japanese to write for the first time.The Chinese characters named “kanji” had a difficult pronunciation for Japanese in that time, but Buddhist priests find a new way system of writing ,”kana “writing. The “kanji” have two styles of reading and writing” onyomi”(音読み)the Chinese reading and “kunyomi”(訓読み)the Japanese reading of kanji.
Later on the women of the Heian Court in Tokyo introduced a new style of writing “hiragana” in order to write poetry, novels and diaries, style used today to transcribe the kanji and especially used by children.
Katakana, the third writing style is use for loan words or for some names.
From ancient time, the Japanese language developed in four stages: Old Japanese (8th century) Late Old Japanese (9th-11th centuries) Middle Japanese (till 16th century) and the Modern Japanese (till today)。
The ancient Japanese people used special tools for write kanji(漢字) and the Chinese characters, a brush and black ink, but today this style is rare been used to write for special occasions, like hagaki(葉書) (post cards –for New Year or wedding ceremony ).
This writing style is called shodo(書道) –Japanese calligraphy considered more of an art form. The reason for this is that each character has a special meaning .Now the Japanese calligraphy is famous around the world not only in Japan.
Today, because of the interest in Japan’s unique culture, language and Japan’s economic power, the need of learning this language has increase and the mystic of this language will last forever dispute of technology and modernization.
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