Editing Old Japanese (section)

{{short description|Oldest attested stage of the Japanese language}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=September 2021}}
{{Infobox language
| name             = Old Japanese
| altname          = 
| nativename       = {{lang|jpn|夜麻登許登婆}}<br/>{{lang|jpn|大和言葉}} {{lang|jpn|大和詞}} {{lang|jpn|大和辞}}
| region           = [[Japan]]
| era              = 8th century
| familycolor      = altaic
| fam1             = [[Japonic languages|Japonic]] <!-- Please do not add disputed classifications such as Altaic here; they are discussed in the article body, but the infobox is intended to be a concise overview of accepted facts. -->
| protoname        = [[Proto-Japonic]]
| script           = ''[[Man'yōgana]]''
| image            = Buddha footprint Poems Stele2.JPG
| imagesize        = 
| imagealt         = Rubbing of a stone with eleven columns of standard Chinese characters
| imagecaption     = Rubbing of ''[[Bussokuseki-kahi]]'' poems carved {{circa|752}}, recording Old Japanese using [[Chinese characters]]
| iso3             = ojp
| linglist         = ojp
| lingname         = {{efn|Described as "The ancestor of modern Japanese. 7th–10th centuries AD." The more usual date for the boundary between Old Japanese to Middle Japanese is {{circa|800}} (end of the Nara era).}}
| notice           = IPA
| glotto           = oldj1239
| glottorefname    = Old Japanese
}}
{{nihongo|'''Old Japanese'''|上代日本語|Jōdai Nihon-go}} is the oldest attested stage of the [[Japanese language]], recorded in documents from the [[Nara period]] (8th century). It became [[Early Middle Japanese]] in the succeeding [[Heian period]], but the precise delimitation of the stages is controversial.
Old Japanese was an early member of the [[Japonic languages|Japonic]] language family. No genetic links to other language families have been proven.

Old Japanese was written using [[man'yōgana]], which is a writing system that employs [[Chinese characters]] as [[syllabogram]]s or (occasionally) [[logogram]]s. It featured a few phonemic differences from later forms, such as a simpler syllable structure and distinctions between several pairs of syllables that have been pronounced identically since Early Middle Japanese. The phonetic realization of these distinctions is uncertain. [[Internal reconstruction]] points to a pre-Old Japanese phase with fewer consonants and vowels.

As is typical of Japonic languages, Old Japanese was primarily an [[agglutinative language|agglutinative]] language with a [[subject–object–verb]] word order, adjectives and adverbs preceding the nouns and verbs they modified and auxiliary verbs and particles appended to the main verb. Unlike in later periods, Old Japanese adjectives could be used uninflected to modify following nouns. Old Japanese verbs had a rich system of tense and aspect suffixes.