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Japanese: Words
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The basic Japanese word order is Subject Object Verb. Subject, Object, and other grammatical relations are usually marked by particles, which are suffixed to the words that they modify, and are ... properly called postpositions.
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[T]he native Japanese word for water is mizu while the Sino-Japanese word is sui. Both are written with the same character. The former is known as the kun yomi (Japanese reading) of the character while the latter is known as the on yomi (Chinese reading) of the character.
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At first, the Japanese wrote in Classical Chinese, with Japanese names represented by characters used for their meanings and not their sounds. Later, this latter principle was used to write pure Japanese poetry and prose; ... some Japanese words were written with characters for their meaning and not the original Chinese sound. An example of this mixed style is the Kojiki, which was written in 712 AD. They then started to use Chinese characters to write Japanese in a style known as
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Several aspects of Japanese grammar may be surprising to English speakers who are learning Japanese. For example, Japanese does not make a distinction between singular or plural. Moreover, even though Japanese grammar does not assign gender to words, Japanese vocabulary can vary according to whether a man or a woman is speaking.
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Japanese nouns are not marked for either number or gender. When necessary, number can be expressed by indicating quantity or adding a suffix. in a small number of native Japanese words, plurality can be expressed by reduplication, e.g., yama 'mountain,' yamayama 'many mountains.'
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Over time a writing system emerged in which Chinese characters were used to write either words borrowed from Chinese or Japanese words with the same or similar meanings. Chinese characters were ... used for their phonetic values to write grammatical elements and these characters were simplified and eventually became two syllabic scripts, hiragana and katakana.
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