Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 11.djvu/161

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JAPANESE AET. 141 JAPANESE LANGUAGE. 1886). There is a valuable chapter in Dres- the folio volume issued by the Japanese Imperial scr, Japan: Its Architecture, Art, and Art Commission at the Paris Exposition of 1900, Manufactures (New York, 1882), and also Histoire de I'art du Jupoii (Paris, 1900). JAPANESE DEER. The name in England, where this deer has been introduced into parks, of the sika (Cervus si- ka ) . See Sika. JAPANESE LANGUAGE. The most iiiijjortant member of a very small family of lan- guages. Its nearest relatives are Luehuan, and the languages spoken in the little islands which lie between .lapan and Loo-choo. On the Asiatic con- tinent Korean resembles it in grammatical structure, and more remotely in etymology. It is not related to Aino or to Chinese. Efl'orts to find other members of the family and to establish more distant relation- ships have been made in vari- ous directions, but with little success. It is called, somewhat vaguely. Altaic; but the identi- fications are not very convinc- ing, and the results thus far cannot be regarded as scientifi- cally established. CiiAKACTERLSTics. Words and inflections are frequently fonned by loosely joining words and parts of words to other words, so it is described as agglutina- tive. Native grammarians di- vide its words into two classes, iminflected and inflected. The former includes nouns, pro- nouns, numerals, postpositions, and some adjectives which are really nouns. The inflected words are most of the adjec- tives and verbs. Nouns do not distinguish gender, number, or case. The a|iparent exceptions really conform to the rule, for when the distinction of sex is imperative it is formed by using a special word, and when number must be indicated there .is reduplication or the use of words signifying number. There are no personal pronouns ; but when, in exceptional cases, a pro- noun is required certain nouns arc used which retain in common conversation their ordinary meanings. Relative pronouns are wholly want- ing, the relative word or clause being placed be- .fore the word qualified, as we may say "the mur- dered man' for 'the man who was murdered.' There is no article, and our prepositions are rep- resented by postpositions, the latter having cer- tain uses which have no equivalent in European prepositions. The verb also, in some of its as- pects, dilfers widely from the verb in languages more familiar to ourselves. It is conjugated in three tenses, past, present, and future, but in a wide r.Tnge of moods: probable, conditional, con- cessive, frequentative, imperative. It has. how- PAOE PROM THE GWA-FC (COLLECTION OP STUDIES) BY HOEUSAI much in the book of the Imperial Commission of 1900. The painting of Japan has been treated espe- cially by William Anderson, Pictorial Arts of Japan (London, 1886), a noble folio, and in the same author's Catalogue of Japanese and Chinese I'aintings in the British Museum (ib., 1886). Gonse, in the book named below, deals with the subject, but when he wrote few paintings had been studied by the people of the West. Consult, also, Gierke's Jupanisehe Malerien (Berlin, 1882) ; also much in the volume of the Imperial Commission of 1900. As for the decorative arts, which occupy so large a field in the Western ideas of Japanese art, there are very many books on special branches of the subject and on all the industrial arts together. Costly folios are these: Audslev's Ornamental Arts of Japan (2 vols., London 1882-85) ; Audsley and Bowes's Ceramic Art of ever, neither number nor person, and, one might Japan (2 vols., London, 1876); Gonse's L'art almost add, it has only the present tense. For its japonais (2 vols., Paris, 1883) ; and especially past tense denotes primarily certainty, and is