Old Japanese

Old Japanese ( jōko nihongo) is the oldest attested stage of the Japanese language.
This stage in the development of Japanese is still actively studied and debated, and key OJ texts, such as the Man'yōshū, remain obscure in places.

Dating

Linguistic changes are gradual, and the periodization of Japanese is "both delicate and controversial", with multiple competing methods and criteria for division. For both practical and conventional reasons, these divisions often correlate to political events. As such, the accepted upper bound (end date) for Old Japanese is 794 A.D, when the capital Heijōkyō moved to Heiankyō. However, it is difficult to fix a lower bound. A limited number of Japanese words, mostly personal names and place names, are recorded phonetically in ancient Chinese texts such as the "Wei Zhi" portion of the Sanguo Zhi (3rd century CE). Wooden tablets and relics with fragments of text written on them have also been excavated. However, without discounting this fragmentary early evidence, the lower bound is generally placed circa 712 for practical reasons: 712 is the traditional date of composition of the Kojiki, the oldest extant written OJ text of substantial length. A lower bound circa 712 also coincides well with the Nara period (710-794). (A more formal dating methodology might simply date OJ as "through 794", without recognizing a lower bound at all.) Besides Kojiki, the other oldest literary sources include Fudoki (720), Nihon Shoki (720), and Man'yōshū (c. 759).


Limitations of Writing system

Using Chinese characters to write other languages created the following limitations.

• Only one liquid consonant: /l/
• Limited ability to represent close syllables

Middle Chinese allowed open syllables and the codas p,t,k,m,n and ng(ŋ). Old Chinese had more closed syllables (some reconstructions, such as Li Fang-Kuei's and Akiyasu Tōdō's, eliminate open syllables entirely).
However, some written Old Japanese seems to include attempts to represent closed syllables. For example, sö (so₂) and its vowel alternation sa, originally a binding particle, are often written as  (tsǝŋ) and (tsar), suggesting a final consonant sound at the end of the syllable. (Etymologically those are thought as same as demonstrative söre (so₂re) and saru.)
Another example of evidence for closed syllables (although not necessarily in Old Japanese) is the fact that ("plain, field") is read hara (or bara) in standard Japanese, but paru/baru in southwestern and far western Japan. Combined with words like harappa, which has been analyzed as a reduplication: par(ar)par, this suggests that there may have been a proto-Japanese /par/ or /pal/.
In the opposite case, Old Classic Chenese people heard and wrote proto-Japanese. For example, in 3rd century, there was a queen named  /pieg miěr hag/.
the word kana(-gana) it self came from kari-na(loan-name/character) > karna > kanna > kana.
Kojiki distinguished shàngshēng (jōshō, jōsei ) and qùshēng (kyoshō, kyosei ). Those are thought as which

• vowel length: long or short
• pitch accent: high or low