One of the things that's surprised me as I learn more about Japanese is that onyomi are actually borrowed sounds, and that they sound like Old and Middle Chinese. So even for mundane things that the native Japanese language at the time must have had words for, the Chinese pronunciation for these was imported along with the written characters.

This raises the question: is there a field of research involved with reconstructing the sound of Japanese before the various waves of kanji/onyomi importation? Can one reconstruct what a normal every-day sentence like "I am thirsty, when are we finished here?" or "there is a wild boar nearby" sounded like in Japanese 500, 1000, 1500 years ago, presumably with fewer and fewer onyomi and more and more native pronunciations? Does this field not exist because of the paucity of data---that nobody wrote about the pronunciations of words before onyomi were adopted?

And a related question would be: what was the process by which onyomi, as adopted sounds from Chinese, spread to all the Japanese people? I imagine that when an onyomi (with or without a kanji) was first adopted, its use must have been limited to the literati. Do researchers know how long it took for that pronunciation to replace the native Japanese pronunciation for the same word, which was no doubt used by peasants far from the literati, and "fix" itself as the way it was pronounced in Japanese? Here, I'm mainly thinking of words that are common enough to have to have existed in native Japanese, not high-falutin words like "mandate of heaven" or "Confucian principles" that had to be imported.

I am painfully aware that my mental model of these things is so incomplete and incoherent that my questions are probably not even logical. Googling "pre-onyomi kunyomi" or "pre-Chinese Japanese" obviously isn't any help, not even "Japanese paleolinguistics". There's so much about the kanji and the evolution of the modern Japanese writing system, but I've come across very little about the evolution of its pronunciation. Any pointers to reading material would be much appreciated!

I'm fairly sure the wago of today are descended more or less cleanly from the wago of old Japanese, so it probably sounded something like that, except with all the expected drift (which I think they can partially reconstruct with things like Manyougana and guesswork). On top of that, both of the example sentences you mention easily could, and I think naturally would, be phrased entirely in kun words, not on.

My suggestion would be to check a university for materials or leads, since this is outside the normal functions of Google.
I've already said the most important bit, so you can decide whether to continue reading or not.

Don't take this as fact, because I know about as much as you regarding this topic.
From what I understand, there was no written language for Japanese before contact with the Chinese (even kana were adapted from Chinese characters). So, to have a written record of what the Japanese sounded like before all the Chinese influences, you'd have to find Chinese records of it, which are unlikely to exist, in my opinion (they'd have to date from when the Chinese first made contact with the natives of Japan and the Chinese would have to care to record such things; then the records would have to survive).

Other observations would have to be taken from the other languages of Japan, and sifted through the Korean and Chinese languages, in order to find the words that don't match up (assuming Japan was mostly isolated before contact with the Chinese). Considering the differing vocal systems of these languages, that'd be quite a task.

As for the spread of Chinese, it is easy to imagine the nobility slowly spreading them through spoken edicts, retainers, and written word; trickling down through the ranks until the majority of the population understood it. Chinese was kind of like the Japanese version of proto-French to the English: the wealthiest and most influential knew it, making it a desirable skill to those below. And servants were probably expected to know some of the words in order to fulfill their duties (kind of like 'pork' and 'pig' in my earlier comparison).
At least, that's my understanding of it.

Sauzer Wrote:I'm fairly sure the wago of today are descended more or less cleanly from the wago of old Japanese, so it probably sounded something like that

Reading more about wago and Yamato Kotoba on Tofugu is certainly very enlightening, thanks!

Interesting question! I found this page by googling "History of the Japanese Language". Just a little tid-bits, but it's interesting that Japanese originally had 8 vowel phenomes. There's a bibliography that might be jumping off places for further research. Please update us if you find anything interesting.

Our best records of oldest Japanese are the Kojiki and the Man'yoshu, and reconstruction can be done to figure out the pronunciation.

The main difference was that the ha-gyo was pronounced with a "p" consonant. Also the voiced consonants had a nasal sound in them, so が was more like "nka".

I am honestly not sure when vast amounts of sino-Japanese vocabulary were used in everyday life. I wouldn't be surprised if it's not until after the Meiji restoration, but it almost certainly is not earlier than Edo. A lot of the sino-Japanese words found in the modern language are not referring to things that pre-modern people would have talked about. My assumption would be that until the Edo period, non-aristocratic people used almost no sino-Japanese vocabulary with the exception of some government-related terms and Buddhist terms they knew from their own experience. In the Edo period more people were educated so the amount of available Chinese learning would have increased, but I'm not sure how much that would have affected the amount of Sino-Japanese vocabulary.

One thing to remember is that people still wrote in Chinese up until the Meiji period (or in 漢文交じり), and the literary language was very different from the spoken language. So there may have still been enough of a division between the two languages that there wasn't as much mixing.

It would seem that it would be similar to the French/Old English situation in England, but I don't know much about that either.

yogert909 Wrote:Interesting question! I found this page by googling "History of the Japanese Language". Just a little tid-bits, but it's interesting that Japanese originally had 8 vowel phenomes. There's a bibliography that might be jumping off places for further research. Please update us if you find anything interesting.

That theory is not the consensus yet. They may be conditional allophones overly detected by a Baekje refugee. Nihon-shoki consists of two parts where, on the one hand, the orthography (which forms the 8 vowel theory) is well kept and chinese grammer is accurate and where, on the other hand, they're random and inaccurate. That may indicate one writer was a foreigner and the other was Japanese. One claims that current Kansai speakers still have those conditional allophones. http://music.geocities.jp/konatarosu/Hak...6shou.html

Can you supply any peer-reviewed papers that suggest there were not 8 vowels? I've never seen this claim before.

I'm never an expert and not elaborate myself but the Japanese wiki page (上代特殊仮名遣い) introduces several theories ranging from 'for' to 'against'. But the dominant variations seem to consider 8 vowels were phonemic in Kinki region at that time. (Man'yo-shu includes poems by speakers from various regions.)