History of Asia

Japanese Language - History of the Japanese Language

A binding language spoken by over 120 million people living in Japan, 200,000 in Hawaii, 200,000 in the United States and nearly 400,000 in Brazil.

There is no relationship between Japanese and other languages. Similarities in the lexicon only exist with East Asian languages ​​such as Tibetan-Burmese and Austro-Asiatic.

From the 8th century onwards, only Chinese characters were used as phonetic signs — each sign represented a syllable. A century later, these characters were abbreviated and gave way to the appearance of two Japanese syllabaries or kana ("sign representing a syllable"):katakana and hiragana. After World War II, the number of characters dropped to 1,850, then rose to 2,000, in a significant process of simplifying the written language.


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