Sejarah Perkembangan Bahasa Jepang

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Tulisan kali ini mengenai sejarah bahasa Jepang (Nihongo). Ada sejumlah 126 juta penutur bahasa Jepang di seluruh dunia, di samping tentunya bahasa Jepang menjadi bahasa resmi negara Jepang sendiri.

Bahasa Jepang menempati ranking ke-9 sebagai bahasa yang paling banyak dipakai di dunia. Bahasa ini kebanyakan dipergunakan oleh bangsa-bangsa di sebelah Timur Laut Jepang.  Di samping itu, banyak orang tua yang masih hidup di Korea dan Taiwan sejak masa penjajahan Jepang dulu juga aktif  menggunakan bahasa Jepang ini.

Asal bahasa tulis Jepang dapat ditelusuri hingga ke bahasa China, yakni tulisan Kanji pada abad ke-4 M. Hal ini karena mereka belum mempunyai sistem tulisan yang unik untuk bahasa verbal Jepang mereka.

Terdapat 3 jenis tulisan bahasa Jepang:

  • Aksara Hiragana
  • Aksara Katakana
  • Aksara Kanji (dari China)

 

Aksara Hiragana dan Katakana dikembangkan oleh seorang rohaniawan Budha di abad ke-8 M. Hal ini untuk menolong melafalkan karakter tulisan bahasa China. Adapun bahasa Jepang sendiri memiliki lima huruf vokal yaitu: あa, いi, うu, えe dan おo. Cara melafalkannya pun seperti dalam bahasa Melayu.

Dikatakan bahwa aksara Hiragana dan Katakana mendapat pengaruh fonetik bahasa Sanskerta. Hal itu dapat dibuktikan dengan mencermati urut-urutan aksara Kana. Di samping itu, ada pula sistem alihaksara yang diikenal dengan istilah romaji.

Bahasa Jepang termasuk ke dalam rumpun bahasa Japonic yang juga masuk ke dalam bahasa Ryukkyuan dari pulau Okinawa dan pulau Amami yang terancam punah. Terdapat sebuah teori yang mengatakan bahwa bahasa Jepang dan bahasa Korea sebenarnya berasal dari sumber yang sama.

 

(Baca juga: Sejarah dan Perkembangan Bahasa Korea)

 

Namun ada juga teori lainnya yang mengatakan bahwa bahasa Jepang dan bahasa Korea berasal dari rumpun bahasa yang lebih luas, yakni keluarga bahasa Altaic. Rumpun bahasa ini juga meliputi bahasa lainnya, seperti bahasa-bahasa Turki, bahasa Mongol dan bahasa Tungusik.

Teori lainnya mengatakan bahwa bahasa Jepang berasal dari bahasa yang muncul akibat adanya kontak antara orang-orang Yayoi dan Jomon. Orang Yayoi datang dari arah Timur Laut Jepang ke daratan Jepang sekitar 2000 – 3000 tahun lalu, sedangkan orang Jomon adalah penduduk asli di daratan Jepang.

 

Berikut adalah video mengenai Sejarah Perkembangan Bahasa Jepang.

 

 

Dan ini adalah transkrip dari video tersebut:

Japanese language has around 126 million native speakers. Making it the 9th most spoken language in the world, if we focus on native speakers alone.

It’s spoken mainly in the North-East Asian nation of Japan. And also to a limited extent in some emigrant communities and among some elderly people living in Japan’s former colonies like Korea and Taiwan.

Japanese belongs to the “Japonic” language family which also includes the endangered “Ryukyuan” languages of Okinawa and the Amami Islands. But the early history of Japanese and its relationship to other languages is largely unknown.

There are theories that the Japanese and Korean languages share a common ancestor. And there are theories that Japanese and Korean are part of a wider language family called the Altaic language family, which also includes the Turkic languages, Mongolian, and the Tungusic languages.

But, the Altaic language family, and the connection between Japanese and Korean are theoretic. They’re hotly debated and are not generally accepted.

There are also theories, that Japanese arose from contact between the language of the Yayoi people, who migrated from the North-East Asian mainland Into Japan 2000 – 3000 years go and the language or languages of the Jomon people who were already living there.

But, the nature of the language is that these 2 groups of people spoke is not clearly known. Japanese was not a written language in its early history, during the Yayoi period. Which leaves us very little evidence of what it was actually like during that time.

In the 3rd century CE, the Yamato state in Japan established relations with China. And the next 600 years would be a period of heavy Chinese influence. During which the rulers and the elite thought that emulates many aspects of
Chinese culture.

Written Chinese was probably introduced to Japan in the 4th Century. And since Japanese had no written form, “Classical Chinese became the first literary language” used by the elite. Later, “Chinese characters” began being adapted to “write Japanese.”

The earliest examples we have of Japanese writing are from the 8th century and there are 2 forms: Kanbun (漢文) and Man’yōgana (万葉仮名). Kanbun was the writing of Japanese in “Classical Chinese style,” using Chinese characters to represent the meaning of Japanese words. These texts were essentially Chinese, but were “intended to be readable in Japanese.”

Man’yōgana was a way of writing Japanese entirely in Chinese characters, with most of the “characters representing
the phonetic sound” of the underlying Japanese syllables. For example, The Japanese word for “mountain” – yama – was written using these 2 Chinese characters: for their phonetic value, rather than using the Chinese character. Which means mountain, which is the character used today?

And not only one Chinese character was used for each sound. Numerous different characters could be used to represent the same sound. For example, the syllables “ka” could be represented by any of the following characters:

Writing Japanese characters phonetically using Chinese characters that had no connection to the meaning, must have felt like a lot of unnecessary hard work. So, 2 systems of simplified phonetic characters developed from the
Man’yōgana system in the 8th and 9th centuries in order to simplify the writing process.

These 2 systems were ❝Hiragana (ひらがな)❞ and ❝Katakana (カタカナ)❞ one of the main uses of these new ❝Kana (仮名)❞ systems was to annotate ❝Kanbun (漢文)❞ text. So, that Japanese speakers could read these classical Chinese or Chinese style texts as though they were Japanese.

Chinese characters represented the meaning of the content words while Kana provided the pronunciation, as well as the grammatical elements and inflections that were not present in Chinese. Some diacritic marks also indicated how to change the word order when reading the text in Japanese.

This method of annotating Chinese texts with “Kana” was the precursor to the Modern Japanese writing system. Through this process of trying to make written Chinese language fit with the spoken Japanese language, a huge amount of Chinese vocabulary entered Japanese.

Chinese characters were sometimes annotated to be pronounced with their Chinese pronunciation. Known as ❝ON-YOMI (音読み)❞ and sometimes pronounced as a native Japanese word with a similar meaning. These pronunciations are known as ❝KUN-YOMI (訓読み)❞. Such Chinese words have become an integral part of Japanese, comprising 60% of the total vocabulary (particularly in writing).

During the Late Middle Japanese period, from the year 1185 to 1600. Japanese continued to develop and moved closer towards Modern Japanese phonologically in particular. Towards the end of this time period, in the year 1543 the first Europeans visited Japan.

Some European vocabulary entered Japanese through contact with traders and missionaries. This contact mostly came to a halt during the ❝period of national isolation❞ from 1603-1853. During this time, contact with foreigners
was strictly limited to a couple of specific places, like the Dutch trading post ❝Dejima❞ in Nagasaki.

A significant number of Dutch loanwords did entered Japanese during this time period, some of them common everyday words. Like; “garasu (ガラス),” from “glas.” “ranpu (ランプ),” from “lamp.” “kōhī (コーヒー),” from “koffie.” “koppu (コップ),” from “kop” (cup).

These words are examples of ❝Gairaigo (外来語)❞ loanwords aside from Chinese borrowings and compounds, normally loanwords from European languages, which are normally written in Katakana.

This period of isolation took place during the Edo Period during which the capital moved from Kansai to Edo, present-day Tokyo. And the Edo dialect became the standard variety of Japanese.

After this period of isolation ended in 1853, interaction with the outside world greatly increased. And this affected
the Japanese language as it entered the Meiji Period. The number of Gairaigo began to increase. But even more than that, many new compound words were created from Chinese characters, and pronounced using their Chinese pronunciation, the “ON-yomi” pronunciation.

These new compounds words were created to represent new Western concepts, as well as advanced academic vocabulary in the arts, sciences, math, and technology. These new words that were coined using Chinese characters are referred to as “wasei kango (和製漢語)” which means something like, “Japan-made Chinese words.”

Since the end of World WarⅡ, Japanese has adopted a large number of Gairaigo, in particular from English. Some of these represent everyday modern concepts, like; コンピューター (konpyūtā) “computer.” And others represent specialized vocabulary of academia and technology.

During the Meiji period, such specialized vocabulary would have probably been created from Chinese compounds. But in recent decades, English has been a much bigger source of new vocabularies varieties of Japanese.

Standard Japanese today is based on the dialect of Tokyo. But there are also numerous unique and colorful regional and local dialects as well.

There are the distinctive dialects of the Kansai region, which other Japanese people often associate with comedy. Then there are the dialects of Tohoku (which a lot of people have trouble understanding).

And there are the dialects of Okinawa which retains some “elements of” the area’s old “Ryukyuan” languages and many more. Almost everywhere you go in Japan there is a distinctive local dialect.

The dialects of today are much closer to Standard Japanese than they were in the past. There are still some people who speak full-on traditional dialects: in particular older people, working class people, and people in the countryside.

Basically, if someone meets at least two of those criteria that person probably uses much more dialectal speech than a lot of other people. The majority of people speak something close to Standard Japanese. But, with some elements
from the traditional dialect. And when speaking politely to strangers or informal situations people tend to avoid dialectal speech.

So, what is Japanese like?  The basics of Japanese phonology are quite simple. There are only 5 vowels in Japanese.

あa

いi

うu

えe

おo

There are also long versions of these vowels.

あーā

いーī

うーū

えーē

おーō

The distinction between short and long vowels is important to the meaning of words. Japanese vowels are always
fully articulated, and are not reduced like they sometimes are in English.

The consonants of Japanese are for the most part similar to those of English, and cause few problems for learners. Japanese syllables basically all end in a vowel. This makes pronunciation fairly simple. Because there are a few consonant clusters.

You normally don’t have to pronounce multiple consonants side by side. There are a couple of exceptions to this, one is doubled consonants. For example the word, 学校 “school” (gakkou), if we pronounce these characters separately they are ga”k”u + “k”ou. But because the consonants in these 2 syllables, are the same, they merge together, as 1 lengthened consonant.

Written with a small letter, 2 between them, to indicate that you hold the consonant for twice as long. you don’t say “gaku-kou” But, ga”kk”ou が “っ” こう another exception is having a nasal sound followed by another consonant. The nasal sound ん functions as its own syllable without a vowel. So, we have words like, かんぱい 乾杯 (kanpai) which means, cheers….(Please watch the entire video to find out the rest)

 

Source: Langfocus Channel on Youtube

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