is a stage of the Japanese language between 794 and 1185, which is known as the Heian period (). The successor to Old Japanese (), it is also known as Late Old Japanese. However, the term "Early Middle Japanese" is preferred, as it is closer to Late Middle Japanese (, after 1185) than to Old Japanese (before 794).
Old Japanese had borrowed and adapted the Chinese script to write Japanese. In Early Middle Japanese, two new scripts emerged: the kana scripts hiragana and katakana. That development simplified writing and brought about a new age in literature, with many classics such as The Tale of Genji, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, and The Tales of Ise.
Early Middle Japanese was written in three different ways. It was first recorded in Man'yà Âgana (), literally "ten thousand leaves borrowed labels", in reference to the Man'yà Âshà « poetry anthology and the "borrowing" of the kanji characters as "labels" for the sounds of Japanese. Certain Chinese characters were borrowed to phonetically spell out Japanese sounds. Cursive handwriting gradually gave rise to the hiragana (, "flat/simple borrowed labels") and Buddhist shorthand practices of using pieces of kanji to denote the sounds then developed into the katakana (, "partial/piece borrowed labels").
It is worth noting that the man'yà Âgana in each cell only indicates one of many contemporary options for spelling each Japanese mora â in the table above, each chosen character is the direct origin of the corresponding modern hiragana. See also Hentaigana for a fuller description of how multiple hiragana could be used to spell a single sound. Also note that hiragana forms were not standardized at that time.
Although man'yà Âgana specify different kanji to represent voiced phonemes versus unvoiced phonemes, it is not until the Meiji period that we see standardized usage of the dakuten diacritic <code>ãÂÂ</code> to explicitly mark voicing for hiragana and katakana.
Japan officially adopted simplified shinjitai (, "new character forms") in 1946 as part of a round of orthographic reforms intended to improve literacy rates. The so-called kyà «jitai (, "old character forms") are equivalent to Traditional Chinese characters, and these forms were the ones used in historical man'yà Âgana. Modern transcriptions of classical texts are predominantly written in shinjitai. To avoid unnecessary ambiguity, quotes from classical texts would be written in kyà «jitai.
Additionally, there are many spelling differences between Modern Japanese and Early Middle Japanese even for the same word. For example, is spelled in modern Japanese hiragana as (man'yà Âshà «), while in Early Middle Japanese, this would have been (man'yefushifu). Details on these spelling rules are helpful for understanding historical kana usage.
Major phonological changes were characteristic of the period.
The most prominent difference was the loss of certain spelling distinctions found in the Jà Âdai Tokushu Kanazukai ("Ancient Special Kana Usage"), which distinguished two types of , , and . While these distinctions had begun to blur already at the end of the Old Japanese stage, they were completely lost in Early Middle Japanese. The final distinction to be lost was /ko<sub>1</sub>, go<sub>1</sub>/ vs. /ko<sub>2</sub>, go<sub>2</sub>/. For example, around the year 800 in very early Early Middle Japanese, in the same text /ko<sub>1</sub>/ was still represented by cursive ãÂÂãÂÂ, while /ko<sub>2</sub>/ was represented by cursive ãÂÂãÂÂ.
In the 10th century, and progressively merged into , and and had merged into /wo/ by the 11th century.
An increase in Chinese loanwords had a number of phonological effects:
The development of the uvular nasal and geminated consonants occurred late in the Heian period and brought about the introduction of closed syllables (CVC).
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Theories for the realization of include , , and . It may have varied depending on the following vowel, as in Modern Japanese.
========== By the 11th century, had merged with between vowels.
Syntactically, Early Middle Japanese was a subject-object-verb language with a topic-comment structure. Morphologically, it was an agglutinative language.
A paragraph of Early Middle Japanese can be divided into the following units from large to small.
Words were classified as follows:
(Auxiliary) Particles had various functions, and they can be classified as follows:
The nominative function was marked by the absence of a particle in main clauses and by the genitive particles in subordinate clauses. The dative/locative particle -ni was homophonous with the simple infinitive form of the copula -ni, with verbal suffixes supplies more complex case markers -ni-te ('at' a place) and -ni si-te or -ni-te ('by means of'). A number of particle + verb + -te sequences provided other case functions: -ni yori-te 'due to' (from yor- 'depend'), -ni tuki-te 'about, concerning' (from tuk- 'be attached'), and -to si-te 'as' (from se- 'do'). More complex structures were derived from genitive particle + Location Noun + appropriate case particle (typically locative -ni) and were used particularly to express spatial and temporal relations. Major location nouns were mafe 'front' (Noun-no mafe-ni 'in front of Noun'), ufe 'top' (Noun-no ufe-ni 'on top of Noun' ~ 'above Noun'), sita 'under' (Noun-no sita-ni 'under Noun), saki 'ahead' (Noun-no saki-ni 'ahead of Noun)', etc.
There were some special particles that limited the inflectional form of the yougen and auxiliary verb at the end of a sentence. These particles are called binding particles(). These limitations are called binding rules().
Note that the case particleãÂÂ<span dir="ltr" lang="ja">ã¨</span>ãÂÂindicates a preceding quote, and a quote should be considered as an independent sentence when applying the binding rule.
Susumu à Âno assumed that these binding particles were originally final particles. For example:<blockquote> Man'yà Âgana: (from Man'yà Âshà «, 265th)
Modern transliteration:
Translation: How miserable! it starts to rain!</blockquote>Notice that ãÂÂã is attributive(the modification to the noun ãÂÂãÂÂ). According to his assumption, if we want to emphasize the noun ãÂÂãÂÂ, we can invert the whole sentence as the following:<blockquote></blockquote>Obviously, this gives birth to the binding rule. Since other binding particles can also be considered as final particles in Old Japanese, this assumption is reasonable.
Early Middle Japanese verb inflection was agglutinative. Most verbs were conjugated in 6 forms and could be combined with auxiliary verbs to express tense, aspect, mood, voice, and polarity. Several of the auxiliary verbs could be combined in a string, and each component determined the choice of form of the preceding component.
In Japanese there are many different yougens with the same pronunciation, or the same yougen has various meanings. To distinguish, modern transliteration uses Kanji to highlight these differences. For example, the lower bigrade verbsãÂÂãÂÂmeans "get used to", but its also means "become familiar" which is represented byãÂÂãÂÂ. Meanwhile, the quadrigrade verbãÂÂãÂÂhas the same pronunciation with ãÂÂãÂÂbut it actually means "become".
Early Middle Japanese inherited all eight verbal conjugations class from Old Japanese and added new one: , but there's only ãÂÂãÂÂ("kick by foot") classified as Lower Monograde in Early Middle Japanese.
Early Middle Japanese Verbs were divided into 5 class of regular conjugations:
Quadrigrade (, yodan), Upper monograde (, kami ichidan), Lower monograde (, shimo ichidan), Upper bigrade (, kami nidan), Lower bigrade (, shimo nidan).
There were also 4 "irregular" () conjugations:
K-irregular (, kahen), S-irregular (, sahen), N-irregular (, nahen), R-irregular (, rahen).
The conjugation of each is divided into 6 Inflectional forms():
The English names for the irrealis and the realis differ from author to author, including negative and evidential, or imperfective and perfective.
In following table, red part means , while blue part means .
<nowiki>*</nowiki>Noted that most S-irregular is the combination of a noun and ãÂÂãÂÂ, for example, ãÂÂã is a combination of the noun ãÂÂã ('date') and ãÂÂãÂÂ.
The ãÂÂã at the end of the imperative forms is optional, although exceedingly common.
The system of 9 conjugation classes appears to be complex. However, all nine conjugations can be subsumed into variations of two groups:
The irregularity of N-irregular verbs occurred only in the conclusive and the attributive, and as there are no quadrigrade verbs with n-roots, quadrigrade and N-irregular verb patterns may be treated as being in complementary distribution. Vowel-root verbs consist of bigrade verbs (the majority), a few monograde verbs (especially 'see' and 'sit'), the K-irregular verb 'come', and the S-irregular verb se- 'do' (or -ze- in some compounds). The difference between 'upper' and 'lower' bigrade or monograde verbs is whether the vowel at the end of the root was i or e. The difference between bigrade and monograde was whether in the conclusive, attributive, and realis, the initial u of the ending elided the vowel of the root or the vowel of the roots elides the initial u of the ending.
There are some questions about this arrangement of forms:
<blockquote>Man'yà Âgana: ä¹Âå©Âä¹Âå©ÂçÂÂ毠å®Âå ç¡ä¼Â禰å 毠(Man'yà Âshà «, 4503th)<br /> Modern transliteration: </blockquote> It is possible that the monograde verb infinitive form mi above that was used before ãÂÂã was the earlier true conclusive form. Alternatively, the form above may have been an instance of poetic contraction to limit the number of morae on the line to the expected seven.
Auxiliary verbs are attached to the various forms of yougen, and a yougen could be followed by several such endings in a string. Auxiliary verbs are classified into many inflectional class like verbs.
Generally, to learn how to use an Auxiliary verb, we need to know (1)its inflection, (2)required forms of its preceding word, and (3) various function. The following is a detail example about ãÂÂãÂÂand ãÂÂãÂÂ.
ãÂÂã requires to be preceded by irrealis -a ending (i.e. quadrigrade, N-irregular and R-irregular), while ãÂÂãÂÂrequires irrealis -a ending(i.e. other classes).
They have 4 different functions.
Voice: 'passive' and 'causative':
Tense/Aspect:
Mood:
Polarity:
There were two types of adjectives: regular adjectives and adjectival nouns.
The regular adjective was subdivided into two types: those for which the adverbial form ended in ãÂÂ-ãÂÂ(-ku) and those that ended in ãÂÂ-ãÂÂ(-siku).
The class of siku-adjectives included a few adjectives that had ãÂÂ-ãÂÂ(-z), rather than ãÂÂ-ãÂÂ: They usually had ãÂÂ-ã rather than ãÂÂ-ã in its attributive form.
The -kar- and -sikar- forms () were derived from the verb ãÂÂãÂÂ"be, exists.": <blockquote> Man'yà Âgana: å¯å¥Âä¹Â家ç (Man'yà Âshà «, 4333th)
Modern transliteration: </blockquote> Since the auxiliary verb of pass tentative moodãÂÂãÂÂneeds to be preceded by infinitive, ãÂÂãÂÂis in infinitive form. And then naturally, the adjective ãÂÂãÂÂlinks to ãÂÂã by infinitive (). In Man'yà Âshà « there's also example of ãÂÂ-ãÂÂ. <blockquote> Man'yà Âgana: å å¥Âä¹Â家ç (Man'yà Âshà «, 793th)
Modern transliteration: </blockquote> Since the auxiliary verb of unwitnessed pastãÂÂãÂÂneeds to be preceded by infinitive, ãÂÂãÂÂis in infinitive form.
So it's reasonable to assume that the infinitive suffixãÂÂ-ãÂÂis derived from ãÂÂ-ãÂÂthat had lost its initial u-sound(i.e. sound change of infinitive suffix + ãÂÂãÂÂ). There's also similar example about other forms in Man'yà Âshà «.
From above paragraph, we can realize that kari inflection is generally used to link to an auxiliary verbs(so it's also called ãÂÂãÂÂ, "complement and auxiliary inflection"), but there's an example to show that the imperative form of kari inflection is an exception of this rule: <blockquote> (Senzai Wakashà «, 708th) </blockquote>That is, the imperative form of kari inflection is independently used without linking to any auxiliary verb.(However, it actually expresses a wish but not an order.)
<nowiki>*</nowiki>The Japanese term (seuzen, modern shà Âzen) is a borrowing from Middle Chinese word with reconstructed pronunciation , meaning âÂÂquietly, softlyâÂÂ. Like (seuzen), most tari adjectives are derived from Chinese borrowings.
The nari and tari inflections shared a similar etymology. The nari form was a contraction of the adverbial particleãÂÂãÂÂand the -r irregular verbãÂÂãÂÂ"be, exist": + â , while the tari inflection was a contraction of the adverbial particle and : + â .