Жапон-Рюкю тілдер отбасы

Language family of Japan

Japonic or Japanese–Ryukyuan (日琉語族), sometimes also Japanic, is a language family comprising Japanese, spoken in the main islands of Japan, and the Ryukyuan languages, spoken in the Ryukyu Islands. The family is universally accepted by linguists, and significant progress has been made in reconstructing the proto language, Proto Japonic. The reconstruction implies a split between all dialects of Japanese and all Ryukyuan varieties, probably before the 7th century. The Hachijō language, spoken on the Izu Islands, is also included, but its position within the family is unclear. Most scholars believe that Japonic was brought to the Japanese archipelago from the Korean peninsula with the Yayoi culture during the 1st millennium BC. There is some fragmentary evidence suggesting that Japonic languages may still have been spoken in central and southern parts of the Korean peninsula (see Peninsular Japonic) in the early centuries AD. Possible genetic relationships with many other language families have been proposed, most systematically with Koreanic, but none have been conclusively demonstrated.

The extant Japonic languages belong to two well defined branches: Japanese and Ryukyuan. Most scholars believe that Japonic was brought to northern Kyushu from the Korean peninsula around 700 to 300 BC by wet rice farmers of the Yayoi culture and spread throughout the Japanese archipelago, replacing indigenous languages. The former wider distribution of Ainu languages is confirmed by placenames in northern Honshu ending in betsu (from Ainu pet 'river') and nai (from Ainu nai 'stream'). Somewhat later, Japonic languages also spread southward to the Ryukyu Islands. There is fragmentary placename evidence that now extinct Japonic languages were still spoken in central and southern parts of the Korean peninsula several centuries later.

According to Shirō Hattori, more attempts have been made to link Japanese with other language families than for any other language. None of the attempts has succeeded in demonstrating a common descent for Japonic and any other language family. The most systematic comparisons have involved Korean, which has a very similar grammatical structure to Japonic languages. Samuel Elmo Martin, John Whitman, and others have proposed hundreds of possible cognates, with sound correspondences. However, Alexander Vovin points out that Old Japanese contains several pairs of words of similar meaning in which one word matches a Korean form, and the other is also found in Ryukyuan and Eastern Old Japanese, suggesting that the former is an early loan from Korean. He suggests that to eliminate such early loans, Old Japanese morphemes should not be assigned a Japonic origin unless they are also attested in Southern Ryukyuan or Eastern Old Japanese. That procedure leaves fewer than a dozen possible cognates, which may have been borrowed by Korean from Peninsular Japonic.

Most Japonic languages have voicing opposition for obstruents, with exceptions such as the Miyako dialect of Ōgami. Glottalized consonants are common in North Ryukyuan languages but are rarer in South Ryukyuan. Proto Japonic had only voiceless obstruents, like Ainu and proto Korean. Japonic languages also resemble Ainu and modern Korean in having a single liquid consonant phoneme. A five vowel system like Standard Japanese , , , and is common, but some Ryukyuan languages also have central vowels and , and Yonaguni has only , , and
In most Japonic languages, speech rhythm is based on a subsyllabic unit, the mora. Each syllable has a basic mora of the form (C)V but a nasal coda, geminate consonant, or lengthened vowel counts as an additional mora. However, some dialects in northern Honshu or southern Kyushu have syllable based rhythm. Like Ainu, Middle Korean, and some modern Korean dialects, most Japonic varieties have a lexical pitch accent, which governs whether the moras of a word are pronounced high or low, but it follows widely different patterns. In Tokyo type systems, the basic pitch of a word is high, with an accent (if present) marking the position of a drop to low pitch. In Kyushu dialects, the basic pitch is low, with accented syllables given high pitch. In Kyoto type systems, both types are used. Japonic languages, again like Ainu and Korean, are left branching (or head final), with a basic subject–object–verb word order, modifiers before nouns, and postpositions. There is a clear distinction between verbs, which have extensive inflectional morphology, and nominals, with agglutinative suffixing morphology. Ryukyuan languages inflect all adjectives in the same way as verbs, while mainland varieties have classes of adjectives that inflect as nouns and verbs respectively. Most Japonic languages mark singular and plural number, but some Northern Ryukyuan languages also have the dual. Most Ryukyuan languages mark a clusivity distinction in plural (or dual) first person pronouns, but no Mainland varieties do so. The most common type of morphosyntactic alignment is nominative–accusative, but neutral (or direct), active–stative and (very rarely) tripartite alignment are found in some Japonic languages.