Page:Lange-Noss - A text-book of colloquial Japanese.djvu/13

 INTRODUCTION

THE JAPANESE LANGUAGE

The Japanese Language is the mother-tongue of about 50,000,000 persons. In Japan proper, excluding the present accessions to the Empire, such as Taiwan (Formosa), the native population is linguistically homogeneous, with the exception of a few remnants of the aborigines. Even the Ainu, of whom about 18,000 may still be found in Hokkaido and Saghalien, are being rapidly assimilated.

The relation of the Japanese to other languages has not yet been satisfactorily determined. The attempt to discover an affinity with the Aryan languages has, it must be said, not been successful; for the words that are identical or even similar are too few to justify the inference of a common origin. the same criticism is applicable to the attempt to establish a relation with the Semitic language. A comparison of Japanese roots with those of certain Altaic languages, such as the Mongolian, Tungusic, Manchurian, Turkish, etc, does not bring us any nearer to the solution of the problem. Nevertheless Japanese is usually regarded as belonging to this great group of Altaic languages, for the reason that it has in common with them the characteristic known as agglutination. That is, Japanese, as in all agglutinative tongues, inflection in the ordinary sense is replaced by a loose attachment of particles to the stem as suffixes, while the stem itself remains comparatively unaffected. But it must be noted that the colloquial as compared with the classical Japanese seems to be in a state of transition from the agglutinative to the inflectional stage. In regard to syntax also the Japanese is very much like some of the languages that belong to the Altaic group, e.g., the Manchurian.

SINICO-JAPANESE

With Chinese the Japanese language proper has no relation whatever. In the former, words are properly monosyllabic and frequently end in consonants; in the latter they are mostly