is a stage of the Japanese language between 794 and 1185, which is known as the Heian period (). The successor to Old Japanese (), it is also known as Late Old Japanese. However, the term "Early Middle Japanese" is preferred, as it is closer to Late Middle Japanese (, after 1185) than to Old Japanese (before 794).
Background
Old Japanese had borrowed and adapted the Chinese script to write Japanese. In Early Middle Japanese, two new scripts emerged: the kana scripts hiragana and katakana. That development simplified writing and brought about a new age in literature, with many classics such as The Tale of Genji, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, and The Tales of Ise.
Writing system
Early Middle Japanese was written in three different ways. It was first recorded in Man'yōgana (), literally "ten thousand leaves borrowed labels", in reference to the Man'yōshū poetry anthology and the "borrowing" of the kanji characters as "labels" for the sounds of Japanese. Certain Chinese characters were borrowed to phonetically spell out Japanese sounds. Cursive handwriting gradually gave rise to the hiragana (, "flat/simple borrowed labels") and Buddhist shorthand practices of using pieces of kanji to denote the sounds then developed into the katakana (, "partial/piece borrowed labels").
It is worth noting that the man'yōgana in each cell only indicates one possible option for spelling each Japanese mora – in the table above, each chosen character is the direct origin of the corresponding modern hiragana. See also Hentaigana for a fuller description of how multiple hiragana could be used to spell a single sound. Also note that hiragana forms were not standardized at that time.
Although man'yōgana specify different kanji to represent voiced phonemes versus unvoiced phonemes, it is not until the Meiji period that we see standardized usage of the dakuten diacritic ゛ to explicitly mark voicing for hiragana and katakana.
Japan officially adopted simplified shinjitai (, "new character forms") in 1946 as part of a round of orthographic reforms intended to improve literacy rates. The so-called kyūjitai (, "old character forms") are equivalent to Traditional Chinese characters, and these forms were the ones used in historical man'yōgana. Modern transcriptions of classical texts are predominantly written in shinjitai. To avoid unnecessary ambiguity, quotes from classical texts would be written in kyūjitai.
Additionally, there are many spelling differences between Modern Japanese and Early Middle Japanese even for the same word. For example, is spelled in modern Japanese hiragana as (man'yōshū), while in Early Middle Japanese, this would have been (man'yefushifu). Details on these spelling rules are helpful for understanding historical kana usage.
Phonology
Developments
Major phonological changes were characteristic of the period.
The most prominent difference was the loss of certain spelling distinctions found in the Jōdai Tokushu Kanazukai ("Ancient Special Kana Usage"), which distinguished two types of , , and . While these distinctions had begun to blur already at the end of the Old Japanese stage, they were completely lost in Early Middle Japanese. The final distinction to be lost was /ko1, go1/ vs. /ko2, go2/. For example, around the year 800 in very early Early Middle Japanese, in the same text /ko1/ was still represented by cursive 「」, while /ko2/ was represented by cursive 「」.
In the 10th century, and progressively merged into , and and had merged into /wo/ by the 11th century.
An increase in Chinese loanwords had a number of phonological effects: Introduction of palatal and labial consonant clusters such as /kw/ and /kj/ Introduction of the uvular nasal Length becoming a phonemic feature with the development of both long vowels and long consonants
The development of the uvular nasal and geminated consonants occurred late in the Heian period and brought about the introduction of closed syllables (CVC).
Phonetics
Vowels
: : : : :
Consonants
Phonetic realization
Theories for the realization of include , , and . It may have varied depending on the following vowel, as in Modern Japanese.
By the 11th century, had merged with between vowels.
Grammar
Syntactically, Early Middle Japanese was a subject-object-verb language with a topic-comment structure. Morphologically, it was an agglutinative language.
Phrase
A paragraph of Early Middle Japanese can be divided into the following units from large to small. Sentence () ：A series of meaningful words divided from a paragraph by 「。」(period).
(from The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter)