Revision as of 18:14, 13 August 2009 by Rosbot(talk | contribs)(New page: <table valign=top> <tr> <td valign=top align=left width="50%"> <table valign=top> <tr><td><b>Also Known As:</b> Japanese language,日本語,Japanese <b>Description:</...)
Japanese (日本語, [nihoŋɡo] ( listen)) is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is related to the Japonic-Ryukyuan languages. Its relationships with other languages remain undemonstrated. It is an agglutinative language and is distinguished by a complex system of honorifics reflecting the hierarchical nature of Japanese society, with verb forms and particular vocabulary to indicate the relative status of the speaker, the listener, and a person mentioned in conversation (regardless of their presence). The sound inventory of Japanese is relatively small, and it has a lexically distinct pitch-accent system. It is a mora-timed language.
The Japanese language is written with a combination of three different types of scripts: modified Chinese characters called kanji (漢字), and two syllabic scripts made up of modified Chinese characters, hiragana (平仮名) and katakana (片仮名). The Latin alphabet, rōmaji (ローマ字), is also often used in modern Japanese, especially for company names and logos, advertising, and when entering Japanese text into a computer. Western style Arabic numerals are generally used for numbers, but traditional Sino-Japanese..... full article at Wikipedia
