This system, which is peculiar and complicated, cannot well be elucidated without entering into details beyond the scope of the present Memoir. The curious in such matters are referred to pp. 39, 47, 86, and 94 of the present writer's “Simplified Grammar of Japanese” (Trübner & Co., London, 1886). Suffice it here to say, that each tense of the indicative mood of Japanese verbs and adjectives is inflected so as to point out the nature of its grammatical agreement with the other words of the sentence, and that one of the results of the system is the formation of immensely long, sentences, all the clauses of which are mutually interdependent, in such wise that the bearing of any one verb or adjective as to tense and mood is not clinched until the final verb has come to round off the entire period. Of such distinctions of “attributive,” “conclusive,” etc., forms, Ainu knows nothing. They are not represented even by the help of auxiliaries.
(11) The whole Japanese language, ancient and modern, written and colloquial, is saturated with the honorific spirit. In Japanese, honorifics supply to some extent the place of personal pronouns and of verbal inflections indicating person. Ainu, on the contrary, has no honorifics unless we give that name to such ordinary expressions of politeness as occur in every language.
(12) A rule of Japanese phonetics excludes the consonant r from the beginning of words.[1] In Ainu no similar rule exists. Those who have most occupied themselves with the Japanese language, will probably be the readiest to regard the aversion to initial r as being, not the result of accident (if such an expression may be allowed), but truly a radical characteristic; for it is shared, not only by Korean, but by other apparently cognate tongues as far as India.
- ↑ Those whose knowledge of Japanese is limited may be startled by this statement, taken in conjunction with the appearance of hundreds of words beginning with r in the pages of Dr. Hepburn’s Dictionary. The explanation of the apparent contradiction is, that all such words are borrowed from the Chinese. In the latter language, the initial is l. But a very soft r is the nearest approach to l of which the Japanese vocal organs are capable. This Chinese li becomes Japanese ri, Chinese liang becomes Japanese ryō, etc.
