Roots of Japanese language

The origin of Japanese is in considerable dispute amongst linguists. Evidence has been offered for a
number of sources: Ural-Altaic, Polynesian, and Chinese amonge others. Of these, Japanese is most
widely believed to be connected to the Ural-Altaic family, which includes Turkish, Mongolian,
Manchu, and Korean within its domain.

Korean is most frequently compared to Japanese, as both languages share significant key features
such as general structure, vowel harmony, lack of conjunctions, and the extensive use of honorific
speech, in which the social rank of the listener heavily affects the dialogue. However, pronunciation
of Japanese is significantly different from Korean, and the languages are mutually unintelligible.

Japanese has an extremely complicated writing system, consisting of two sets of phonetic syllabaries
(with approximately 50 syllables in each) and thousands of Chinese characters called “kanji”,
approximately 2,000 of which the Ministry of Education has designated as required learning before
high school graduation.

The adaptation of Chinese characters during the sixth to ninth centuries A.D. was the most important
event in the development of the language. By the 12th century, the syllabic writing systems,
“hiragana” and “katakana”, were created out of “kanji”, providing the Japanese new freedom in
writing their native language. Today, Japanese is written with a mixture of the three: “kanji”,
“hiragana”, and “katakana”.

Since the mid 18th century the Japanese have adopted a huge amount of “gairaigo”: foreign words
mainly from English. These include “teburu” (table), “biru” (beer), “gurasu” (glass), “aisu” (ice),
“takushi” (taxi) and “hoteru” (hotel).

There are also a few words from Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish, such as “pan” (bread) and “igirisu”
(the UK), from the Portuguese “po” and “ingles”. Such words arrived in Japan mainly during the 16th
and 17th centuries, when missionaries and merchants started to visit the country.