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Introduction about japan culture
Japanese Culture: Its Development and Characteristics
Essay on the culture of japan
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This study will explore selected phonological, typological, orthographical, morphological and syntactical features of the ‘isolate’ language, Japanese, and analyse how far these features differ from English, itself an Indo-European language, with specific emphasis placed on how accessible Japanese speakers would find learning English as a second language, and vice-versa.
The Japanese language is spoken by almost the whole of the East Asian nation of Japan, comprising of up to 128 million speakers.
Shibatani (2009:557) declares Japanese to be an isolate language, a label which has been hotly disputed by linguists, consisting of a wide range of often mutually unintelligible dialects. Japanese, at least in a literary sense, became apparent as early as the eighth century with a number of character borrowings from Chinese evident, up to 60% of contemporary Japanese vocabulary is borrowed from Chinese and a further 10% from English (Shibatani 2009:557). Shibatani’s insistence of Japanese being an isolate language is one consistent with many linguists, however debate has raged throughout the centuries with many languages being seen to be in some way related to Japanese.
A fairly recent theory suggests that the Ryukyuan languages, previous seen as mere dialects of Japanese, may well be sister languages, as part of a Japonic language family (Tranter 2012:3) (Shimoji & Pellard 2010:1).
Shimoji and Pellard (2010:4) argue that the Ryukyuan languages share several phonological phenomena with Japanese, including ‘CV(C) structure, moraic rhythm and pitch accent.’ The debate over whether or not the Ryukyuan languages are simply dialects is acknowledged by Shimoji and Pellard (2010), however they assert that this was purely a ‘socio-political i...
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...ew Haven: Yale University Press.
Okada, H. (1991). Japanese. Journal of the International Phonetic Association. 21 (2), p94-96.
Robeets, M.I (2005) Is Japanese Related to Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic? Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz Verlag.
Shibatani, M. (1990) The Languages of Japan, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
Shibatani, M. (2009) Japanese. In: (ed) Brown, K & (ed) Oqilvy, S. Concise Encyclopaedia of Languages of the World, Oxford, Elselvier. P557-560
Shimoji. M & Pellard, T. (2010.) An Introduction to the Ryukuyan Languages.
Soga, M. (1983). Tense and Aspect in Modern Colloquial Japanese, Vancouver, University of British Columbia Press.
Tranter, N (2012). The Languages of Japan and Korea. New York: Routledge.
Whitman, J. (2012). The Relationship between Japanese and Korean. In: Tranter, N The Languages of Japan and Korea. New York: Routledge. p24-39.