History of the Japanese Language 

Oh my god. I studied Japanese for 15 years and have my N1, and this completely blew my mind. We need like 8 more videos diving into each of these topics please! 😅

That was very interesting! I've been learning Japanese for some years now, but I've never really questioned how the sounds of the language as they are today came to be. I would also love to hear more about the evolution of Japanese grammar, which I am very fond of.

I find the massive spelling reform in 1946 quite notworthy... it introduced small kana (きよ vs きょ) and changed every ゐ (wi), ゑ (we), を (wo) to い (i), え (e), お (o). before 1946, おお was spelled おを(owo)

Anyone who enjoyed this great video should also read Bjarke Frellesvig's "The Japanese Language", which covers all these changes in great detail with lots of sample texts. I had the pleasure of taking his class and it was one of the most enjoyable I have ever taken.

the comparison of hiragana and katakana to their original manyougana explains so much, thank you. this is so fascinating

That transition to the sponsor was smooth as butter.

時間があれば日本語のアクセント変遷を解説して頂きたい

初級から中級に移行する時に、書き言葉に残る文語の表現を理解することは大事ですが、このビデオではその音声的な面が簡潔に解説されていて、秀逸だと思います。

It's rare to see a youtube video with so much background research and knowledge. Well done!

Really interesting video! I enjoyed learning a lot here. I just have one mild criticism, in your attempt to show how a non-affricated /ti/ and /tu/ were pronounced at 1:16 you still affricated these sounds because you do this in your regular English too! Not many people realise that their aspirated /t(ʰ)/ is actually affricated, and it's not widely taught, but once you start noticing it you can't stop hearing it!

Beautifully done and appreciated! ありがとうございます。

Thanks for putting this info together! It seems all too often people talk about the language as some static monolith, without taking into consideration the history and diversity associated with it. This is a great reference guide for looking at some of that history!

oo i’ve been waiting for a video like this on japanese. i’m not too confused on why, but am confused on how to use the sound changes 😂 it’s interesting to see why and how though! i really love the history of languages, especially around asia. your videos are great.

No frickin' way! I basically asked for this exact video (implicitly) a while ago on one of your videos and you did not disappoint one bit. Super dense and super interesting, thank you so much!

great video as always, keep up the great work!

Been looking a video like this for a long time, finally! Really great stuff dude

This was fascinating, also I'm really happy with myself for being able to read/understand almost every instance of (modern) Japanese used in the video. Thanks!

This was super interesting and also I would've watched a video twice as long with you speaking at a normal speed and keeping the slides there for more than a blink of an eye :D Should probably watch this at half speed :D

This is very helpful - thank you.

Great video, very thorough

I just found your channel and binged watched all your videos. Thank you for sharing all of these information in such an entertaining way!

Awesome video. Following for one of the smoothest add transitions I’ve experienced. Linus lvl transition

This is perfect timing for this video to release, I’m currently doing an essay on this exact topic! This helped a lot, so thanks!

didn't know how much i needed this video

Thank you very much, this is exactly the type of content I was looking for considering Japanese language history!!! 😍

I like the history. Thank you for the video

Something quite similar to the aspiration and latter lost of the Japanese /f/ took place in Spanish as well almost by the same period of time (around 1500) at the beggining of words, for example /farina/ or /ferida/ became /harina/ and /herida/, but the combination of /fu/ remained, like in /fuerte/. Japanese and Spanish vowel system is also quite similar, with the same 5 vowles...perhaps with a slightly different /u/

I've always had a mild fascination with the history of Japanese, but I rarely find time to dig for good resources on the phonetic details, despite having interest. (KInd of unrelated, but I also briefly had an interest in Old Japanese / 文語). So this was really helpful.

Such a good video, as someone both learning japanese and a world history fan this one is a gem. Will have to rewatch it a couple of times at lower speed tho, too much to process!

I liked the amount of detail you put in this video. Although it seems to move quite quickly. Just my observation, but i will need to re watch and pause many times to fully digest the amount of information you put into this.

Very comprehensive!

Loved the video! I was wondering, could you share the sources, please? Not trying to be skeptical, I'd just like to read more about it! Or, if anyone in the comments has any recommendation, that would be appreciated too!

Impressive research!

Thank you for this! Would have been interested to also know how the pitch system has evolved throughout the centuries

That transition to your sponsor was smooth as butter!😁

Oh my God, I was literally looking for anything like this a few hours ago. And then I fins this masterpiece

Your sponsorship introduction was A+😁

Very interesting video, I've never heard of those dutch influence so this is a first.

This is very interesting! 👏👍 Would you please consider slowing down your speech, while making these kinds of videoes? And when you show texts and images, pause a little here and there, to let people digest the content a bit?

great job. お疲れ様でした。

Cảm ơn bài nghiên cứu thú vị của bạn về tiếng Nhật trong lúc mà mình đang lười biến học nó. Bài nghiên cứu rất hay, tạo thêm cho mình sự hứng khởi để học tiếng Nhật tiếp 😁 日本語は難しいですが、面白いです。

Ooh how fun! Could you do Korean sometime in the future? I think that would be awesome

Jesus that's a lot of information in short space of time. Well done! Dense and informative.

I'm just starting to learn the language, but the history of the language is very interesting. I just got to これ/それ/あれ part and I thought: It looks like this part of language didn't change much since earliest times, how it can be that such frequently used words obey such consistent rules. And then I see ko2 and so2 at 2:05 and I like, yeah that was a good guess. IE languages would keep such consistency at best in spelling (like in wh-(qu-) questions, and Russian doesn't even have that). At the other side it's interesting to look at things that are similar to my mother tong (Russian), like u-unrounding, palatalization, short /i/ and /u/ drop and as I see from this video merger of dj and j. Language history is fascinating. P.S. And, yes, on /tu/ not being /tsu/ and pronounced /tʰˢu/ it was pretty funny. Also /ti/ sounded like palatalized Russian ти as well, wile the point was that it's not.

That's some really interesting and rare content about historical evolution of Japanese.I think it would be awesome if you do a similar video about the historical evolution of Chinese next.

yesss was waiting for this

Hentaigana are really cool for calligraphy, shodou, where they provide multiple ways of writing the same text. It's pretty cool.

I liked the content, but man, it was at a super speed. The speaker should say "proNUNciation" not proNOUNCEiaton, which I admit is a pet peeve. As a student of Japanese, I really would like to see some interesting examples of sentences with native speakers showing how it sounded. I gave the video a Like because it was a brave attempt to explain an ancient language. English only has old, middle, and modern. Japanese has been around at least three times longer.

The words ending with -ng in Hanbun (Chinese) were symbolized with う in Japanese, but they were pronounced as “-ŋ” until a consonant change occurred.

Amazing video, super interesting! One thing: I'd really appreciate if there were breaks between ideas, just the span of a breath between sentences, because right now the video is hard to follow because all ideas are crammed together. Maybe you could also speak a bit slower. I would appreciate if the video was longer, but therefore easier to understand. As it is, if I want to follow along with what is said I have to pause every 3 seconds 😅 But I don't know how the algorithm works so if this speed is required, so be it^^

I would like to have more details about it! Do you have any reference? books or articles? I want to learn more about old japanese

that plugin was smoother than my brain(very smooth)

It's so crazy and interesting how languages evolve over time

Voiceover is like X10 speed and some slides (full of info) changes to the next in one second. Need to pause to watch numerous times. Choke-full useful information certainly!

Great video︎︎👍🏻

Extremely well done. It may take a couple of replays to catch all the wealth of information presented. One thing, though, is that there is no word "pronounciation" in English. It's "pronunciation," with a change in vowel between noun and verb forms.

Can i have the resources and citation for this video pls, I’d like to read into it. :3

The topic sounds so complicated so I am not surprised nobody makes videos on it.

So when did the dialect spoken by the imperial court deviate from the general language? Like the kind Hirohito gave the surrender speech in.

"safe and secure, just like your internet connection will be if yo-" *aggressively skips 1 minute*

Hmm... for some reason this didn't show up in the subscribed tab. Can't believe I almost missed this!

it is nice introduction.

loved this vid! very interesting to see how Japanese developed

I'd love to see a video on Ryukyu languages.

This was eye-opening

Uh oh this is going to make me try to learn Japanese again. I tried but gave up the two previous attempts but hey, maybe this time will be different

That was the fastest video to sponsorship transition I've ever seen

this was great, would love a similar video for chinese

Thank you for talking about old Japanese! I have a question about the Higarana/Katakana tables. The modern depictions of these tables use latin letters to represent the row and column headers, but this does not feel right to me, why would an alphabet of a language use another language as a guide? So my question is, how were these tables depicted and taught before the latin letters were used to denote the rows and coumns?

I think some of the older kana might've been useful for modern loan words.

I am searching about the order of letters of Hiragana and Katakana. It seems to me that their order has been influenced by Sanskrit. I haven't found anything solid to prove it, so any clue would be helpful.

haven't seen such a comprehensive vidoe about Japanese language so far.

During the Meiji era, some Japanese people wanted to replace Japanese kana with Romaji (Nihon-shiki), to make writing easier.

Classical/Old Japanese is generally not talked about enough. Which is a huge shame, it really deserves it!

I like your speaking style

Neat video

The we kana looks so cool I wish it was still in use commonly

One thing you forgot to mention is that along with the adjectival suffix ~ki becoming ~i, adverbial suffix ~ku became ~u for a short period of time; and then if it follows ~a~ then it becomes contracted to ~ou, e.g. arigataku - arigatau - arigatou. (omedetou and ohayou also originated from these contractions.) But later on the adverbial ~u reverted back to ~ku as we know today.

I really want to know how to specifically pronounce the 3 old vowels ï, ë and ö Does your mouth have to be more flat?

When did the rule of pronouncing and transliterating ん as “n” in the majority of cases but prior to m, b or p (such as sembei, sempai, semba, sempuki, tempura, etc) it be transliterated and pronounced as “m” occur? I am aware that in some idiomatic place names like Gunma prefecture or when there is a hard semantic gap between two kanji it may still be clearly announciated and transliterated as “n” even prior to m, p or b too though.

Make a video about Czech and Slovak

It was painful to watch and took me around 30 minutes to finish, thank you, quite educational, now some things start to make sense anew in Japanese

Mind doing a video on Okinawan and how that evolved?

Cool video. I just don't understand why you're going so fast. Especially about important/interesting topics.

One interesting thing: For the relatively new found electricity the same one-syllable word is used in three Far Eastern countries: In Vietnam "điện", in China "diàn" and in Japan "den". And in Europe this is a five-syllable monster!! In Germany that word is sometimes circumvented by saying "Strom" (stream), but that word does not nail down the exact meaning.

2:05 What is the "V" supposed to represent in the "degree" row? 3:00 I don't think it can be right that man'yogana were used only for sound, because in the example "hakuhi no umi", the 波久比 kanji should indicate "hakuhi", 能 (modern reading nou) the "no", leaving 海 to mean "umi", which is not a Chinese word, nor is it spelled phonetically using man'yogana. This looks like ideographic usage to me. 5:10 So... how did the Japanese speak without particles? Were they just not in use before they were invented in this period, or did they use some other system to denote what means what in a sentence?

本当面白いでも... I found myself really wanting to simmer on pretty much everything.. You're just too darn fast. Could you post a slower version! ❤️

Is this weathering process of pronunciation responsible for the vast number on homophones in Japanese?

You should do a speculation video on how Japanese may evolve in the future. I think the sound ふ fu could disappear and officially become hu, as h eventually took over that whole line originally from a p sound. I would assume some particles like は を will change to get rid of the sound difference of ha/wa and o/wo. And I assume there will be more Western influence, as we see in current slang like words like the ending -なう, which means to be doing something "now." We also could see the い sound dropped from i-adjectives, as many people nowadays do.

Japanese is one of the coolest language and this is not because I'm a weeb but because it has such a cool and fascinating history

I like the video LingoLizard, great job. I have a question. "si" and “zi” became "shi" and “ji” in Early Middle Japanese after all? "sha", "shu", "sho", and "she" showed up in Early Middle Japanese too? When I have researched the language in the past, those syllables showed up in Late Middle Japanese based on the information I read. It is only recently that I'm seeing people saying that those syllables (at least "shi" and "ji") showed up in Early Middle Japanese.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard those words before (at 7:57). I don’t know what they are or how to spell them. Edit: the first one is affricate. Idk about the second one.

That was fast! 1500 years in not even 12 minutes.

Nice

is there like a full japanese chart of syllables with IPA sounds?

So the w glide was only used after the velar plosives k and g?

i find the fact that the whole sponsor segment is just written as "(Sponsor segment)" in the captions really based.

Cool video I enjoyed, but I have some minor criticisms. I'm not sure if this is just your pronunciation but at 5:47 the "る/らる" r's were pronounced very harsh, not as they are pronounced in Japanese. They are a lot "softer" for a lack of a better word. Also, this might just be me but I think you should take a sec to breath for a few moments especially when u cover the screen with text, I'd like a moment to be able to read it all instead of just seeing it and it then being gone. Just my thoughts though, carry on

Interesting how basicalyl every language is 150 years old and its older forms can be understood for about 500 years.

Handakuten can be used with か btw