INTRODUCTION

THE JAPANESE LANGUAGE

In Japan, as in other Eastern countries, two dialects are used simultaneously, one for speaking, the other for writing. The spoken or colloquial dialect is that to which foreign-government officials, merchants, missionaries, and others who are brought into daily relations with the Japanese must devote their first efforts. Their next step should be to acquire the written language, without a knowledge of which practically all books, newspapers, postcards, advertisements, railway-station placards, or steamship notices remain a mystery, even when transliterated into Roman characters. Some of the differences affect the vocabulary. But the constantly recurring difficulties are rather in the grammar, and may be mastered in a comparatively short time by those to whom the colloquial is familiar.

Heretofore, the great obstacle has been the absence of any book specially devoted to the elucidation of the modern form of the written language. Most persons have neither time nor inclination to investigate the Japanese classics or to carry on philological research. Their concern is with the language as commonly written now; and they weary of searching through the pages of a learned work for the everyday forms, which alone to them are useful. The object of the present book is to put before such persons, in as simple and practicable a manner as possible, just so much as will enable them to read contemporary literature. All forms that are obsolete or purely classical have been omitted. Theoretical discussions have been dispensed with, save in a few instances where a knowledge of theory is, for a foreigner, the only road to correct practice.

Japanese literature has flourished without interruption since the eighth century. One consequence of this long and varied career of the Japanese language is the existence at the present day of a number of styles distinguished by strongly marked peculiarities. Leaving aside poetry and a certain ornamental kind of prose cultivated chiefly by a few Shinto scholars, there are four categories of style in common use.

I. The semi-classical style, distinguished by its preference for old native words and grammatical forms. (The standard translation of the New Testament is in this style.)

II. The semi-colloquial style, used much in newspapers. Its phraseology savors largely, and its grammar slightly, of the peculiarities of the modern colloquial dialect.

III. The Chinese style, or Sinico-Japanese, which is replete with Chinese words and idioms. It is founded on the literal translations of the Chinese classics, which were formerly the textbooks in every school. This style is used in the higher type of contemporary literature. We find it in technical books, in some magazines, and in editorials of newspapers.

IV. The epistolary style. Almost exclusively Chinese in phraseology, this style has grammatical peculiarities which are so marked as to necessitate treatment in a separate chapter. It is in general use for all correspondence.

NECESSITY FOR A GRAMMAR IN "ROMAJI"

The system of writing that is in use in Japan is an extremely complicated one, semi-ideographic and semi-syllabic. The ideographs or characters, so called, have been borrowed from Chinese. The syllabary or kana, as it is called in Japanese, is a group of Chinese characters which have been abbreviated and are used phonetically by the Japanese. Uninflected words are written in characters only. Inflected words, that is, the verb and adjective, are written with one or more characters, followed by one or more kana. These kana are used for the purpose of denoting the inflections, but as a matter of fact they do not convey a clear idea of the structure of the Japanese verb or adjective. In almost every case the true stem ends in a consonant which the Japanese language, as written, has no means of showing. The foreign student consequently is frequently confused in attempting to understand the innumerable inflected forms of Japanese verbs and adjectives as they appear in the literature of Japan today.

But the language may be written in Roman characters, and when so written the stems and inflections of the verbs and adjectives show up clearly. What appeared so difficult and confusing to the student becomes then comparatively simple. A purely phonetic system of transliteration has been adopted, and has met with some acceptance both among Japanese and foreigners. To this system the spelling of the following pages conforms.

PARTS OF SPEECH

The words of which the Japanese language is composed fall into two great groups, the uninflected and the inflected.

The uninflected words are: (a) the noun, which, besides the substantive properly so called, includes the pronoun, the numeral, and many words corresponding to English adjectives; (b) the particle; and (c) the postposition, corresponding for the most part to the English particle and preposition. The inflected words are: (a) the adjective; (b) the verb (including participles). This division is not an artificial one made for the sake of convenience, but has its foundation in the nature and history of the language.

What we term adverbs in English are replaced partly by nouns, partly by one of the inflections of the adjective. Conjunctions are largely included under the heading of particles and postpositions, but also often expressed by certain inflections of the verb. Interjections exist, as in other languages; but, being mere isolated words without grammatical connection with the sentence, they call for no remark. The Japanese language has no article.

From one part of speech another may often be formed by adding certain terminations. Thus: rashiki serves to form adjectives expressive of similarity, while more rarely nau forms verbs expressive of action, as: otoko, "man"; otokorashiki, "manly." tomo, "company"; tomonau, "to accompany."

CHAPTER I

THE PHONETIC SYSTEM

ALPHABET AND PRONUNCIATION

1. Japanese, when written with the Roman alphabet, requires the same letters as English, with the exception of l, q, v, and x. The letter c occurs only in the combination ch, which is sounded. nearly like English ch in "church."

2. The vowels are sounded as in Italian: a as in "father"; i as in "pique"; u as in "rude"; e as in "prey"; o as in "home." They are always short unless marked with the sign of long quantity, when care must be taken to pronounce them long, thus: do, "a degree"; dō, "a hall." toru, "to take"; tõru, "to pass through." kuki, "a stem"; kūki, "the air."

The only long vowels of common occurrence are ō and ū. They are found chiefly in words of Chinese origin, where they represent such Chinese diphthongs and nasal sounds as ao, ou, ang, ung, etc.

When preceded by another vowel or by n, e sounds very nearly like ye, i like yi, and o like wo. Thus ue, kon-in, and shio are respectively pronounced uye, kon-yin, and shiwo.

The vowels i and u are sometimes inaudible, or nearly so, in the mouths of Tokyo speakers, as shite, "having done," pronounced shte; jinrikisha, pronounced jinriksha; tsuki, "the moon," pronounced tski; takusan, "much," pronounced taxan; watakushi, "I," pronounced watakshi. Initial u is silent, and the following m doubled in the pronunciation of the four words uma, "horse"; umaki, "tasty"; umaruru, "to be born"; ume, "plum tree," pronounced mma, mmaki, mmaruru, mme. But these deviations are slight and unimportant. All the foregoing words will be understood if pronounced as written.