ABSTRACT
The Joomon and Yayoi Neolithic cultures flourished in Japan from about 6000 BC to the fourth century AD. Nothing is known about their languages, and they seem to have left no written record in the form of inscriptions. Old Japanese, as it first appears in documents of the seventh/eighth centuries, is characterized by a sparse phonological inventory, a polysyllabic lexical structure and an agglutinative morphology, features which qualify the language equally well for inclusion in either the Altaic or the Malayo-Polynesian areal types. Japanese philologists have been much concerned with identifying 'Yamato' words – i.e. pristine Japanese words – as the core of the language. As attested, however, even the oldest stratum of the language does not seem to be entirely free of Chinese loan-words.
