Over 150,000 wooden tablets ( mokkan) dating from the late 7th and early 8th century have been unearthed. Of the 10,000 paper records kept at Shōsōin, only two, dating from about 762, are in Old Japanese. Those fragments are usually considered a form of Old Japanese. Such inscriptions became more common from the Suiko period (592–628). Those inscriptions are written in Classical Chinese but contain several Japanese names that were transcribed phonetically using Chinese characters. The oldest surviving native inscriptions, dating from the 5th or early 6th centuries, include those on the Suda Hachiman Shrine Mirror, the Inariyama Sword, and the Eta Funayama Sword. Ī limited number of Japanese words, mostly personal names and place names, are recorded phonetically in ancient Chinese texts, such as the " Wei Zhi" portion of the Records of the Three Kingdoms (3rd century AD), but the transcriptions by Chinese scholars are unreliable. The most important are the 27 Norito ('liturgies') recorded in the Engishiki (compiled in 927) and the 62 Senmyō (literally 'Announced order', meaning imperial edicts) recorded in the Shoku Nihongi (797). Prose texts are more limited but are thought to reflect the syntax of Old Japanese more accurately than verse texts do. The latter has the virtue of being an original inscription, whereas the oldest surviving manuscripts of all the other texts are the results of centuries of copying, with the attendant risk of scribal errors. Shorter samples are 25 poems in the Fudoki (720) and the 21 poems of the Bussokuseki-kahi (c. The other major literary sources of the period are the 128 songs included in the Nihon Shoki (720) and the Man'yōshū (c. That is the period of the earliest connected texts in Japanese, the 112 songs included in the Kojiki (712). Old Japanese is usually defined as the language of the Nara period (710–794), when the capital was Heijō-kyō (now Nara). Rubbing of Bussokuseki-kahi poems carved c.
Unlike in later periods, Old Japanese adjectives could be used uninflected to modify following nouns. Internal reconstruction points to a pre-Old Japanese phase with fewer consonants and vowels.Īs is typical of Japonic languages, Old Japanese was primarily an agglutinative language with a subject–object–verb word order, adjectives and adverbs preceding the nouns and verbs they modified and auxiliary verbs and particles appended to the main verb. The phonetic realization of these distinctions is uncertain. It featured a few phonemic differences from later forms, such as a simpler syllable structure and distinctions between several pairs of syllables that have been pronounced identically since Early Middle Japanese. Old Japanese was written using man'yōgana, using Chinese characters as syllabograms or (occasionally) logograms. No genetic links to other language families have been proven.
Old Japanese was an early member of the Japonic language family. It became Early Middle Japanese in the succeeding Heian period, but the precise delimitation of the stages is controversial. Old Japanese ( 上代日本語, Jōdai Nihon-go) is the oldest attested stage of the Japanese language, recorded in documents from the Nara period (8th century). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.
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