Yamato Language Origins

Preamble

For centuries the origins of the native language of Japan has intrigued, yet remained elusive to scholars. Many have sought to associate it with various language families, as it shares characteristics of many languages in the world. In his book The Japanese Language, Haruhiko Kindaiichi expressed that Japanese is an anomaly in that there is no other language in the modern world like it¹. It has a loose affiliation with the Altaic family of languages, which is a hotly debated subject among scholars, but generally speaking Japanese is viewed as a language isolate by many modern day linguists. The purpose of this site is to bring forward a new theory on the Origins of the Japanese Language and its deep history.

What follows is a thesis on the origins of the native Japanese language, also known as Yamato kotoba or the Yamato tongue. Grasping the concepts shared herein will require an open mind and a dispelling of some preconceived notions of the origins of nations and languages. The hope is that, by carefully studying the Yamato words and the grammar of the native Japanese language, we will arrive at a new understanding of its origins and the evolution (and preservation) it has undertaken for almost three millenia.

Let me state at the outset that content found herein is a work in progress and subject to update as new insights are found.

House of Omri

The Yamato language originated 27 centuries ago in west Eurasia at the edge of the Zagros mountains in an area that straddles what is now north-western Iran and south-east Turkey. The area was on the borders of the Assyrian empire and the kingdom of Urartu. It was a highly contested area at the time that often switched hands between powers. After securing a number of the fortresses on the frontier, the Assyrians deployed a group of people there from the "House of Ghomri", as they transcribed it, whom they had exiled from their homeland (also known as the Northern Kingdom) to man the outposts and act as a buffer between Assyria and Urartu. This deployment is well documented in Cam Rea's books The Assyrian Exile and March of the Scythians. It was the interchange between these people from the "House of Ghomri" and the people of Urartu that gave birth what would eventually become the Yamato language.

The proposal here is that the Yamato language is a hybrid language. The grammar is derived from Urartian (also known as "Vannic" or "Biani"), and the vocabulary largely derived from a dialect of Ancient Hebrew from the Northern Kingdom. To illustrate this idea, let's have a look at some Yamato words that you may be familiar with which have now also been incorporated into the English language:

Vocabulary

Sake - also having the form "saka" means "rice wine" or "alcoholic beverage". The word "sake" comes from the Ancient Hebrew word "shaqah", which means "to give drink to". An associated word "shakar" means "to be or become drunk". The book of Judges records the tribe of Ephraim having difficulty pronouncing "sh" and instead used "s" [Judges 12:4-6]. So by dropping the "h" from "sh" we get "sakah". In Urartian, words cannot end in consonants, so the "h" is replaced with an "i" to give a derivative of "saka-i", the dipthongs "ai" in Old Japanese was in turn transformed to "e". And this is how the Ancient Hebrew word "shaqah" became the modern Japanese word "sake"! In Japan, the word is used to describe not only rice wine, but also alcohol in general.

Samurai - derived from "samorahu" or "saburahi" in Old Japanese meaning to guard, protect or watch over. The word eventually became the title for the class of military retainers that were permitted to wear swords and served to protect the feudal lords. The word "samurai" comes from the Ancient Hebrew word "shomerah", which in the kingdom of Ancient Israel was the "guard" or "watch". The associated verb in Ancient Hebrew is "shamar" which means to keep, watch or preserve. Although there are phonetic differences (again the "sh" sound mentioned above) and we see different vowels being employed or inserted (in this case the "u" in between the "m" and the "r", and an "a" instead for an "o" for the first vowel), the semantics of the Yamato word and the Ancient Hebrew word are in accord. (I will go over the phonetic transitions from Ancient Hebrew to the Yamato Language here.)

Katana - also having the forms "kataba" and "kataha" in Old Japanese, was used to describe the particular type of sword used by the samurai in feudal Japan. The word itself is a composite of two words in Japanese, "kata" meaning "one", and "ha" meaning "edge" or "blade". These are derived from the Ancient Hebrew words "echad" or "chad" meaning "one", and "peh" meaning "mouth", "edge" or "blade" (the Old Japanese "p" has become "h" in Modern Japanese, but is sometimes written with the forms "b" or "n" as well), respectively. So unlike the double-edge swords found in Europe during the feudal period, the Japanese katana was a "single-edge" sword designed to be held with both hands. It is a "one-blade" sword distinctive to Japan, but comprised of the two Ancient Hebrew words "one" and "edge". (Again, I will cover the phonetic transitions in another section of this site, on the etymology page, and in the Blog posts.)

The full list of words I have mapped to date with descriptions can be found on the Dictionary page.

Grammar

The sentence structure, agglutination and post-position particles of the Yamato language all come from Urartian.

Like Japanese, the sentence structure of Urartian is subject-object-verb (SOV) where the verb comes at the end of the sentence rather than the beginning (e.g. Ancient Hebrew) or the middle (e.g. English).

Yamato example:

(S)		(O)		(V)
anata	ga	sake	o	nomita?	=	did you drink sake?
(you)		(sake)		(drink)

Uratian example:

(S)	(O)	(V)
ieše	DUB-te	kugu-bi	=	I wrote the inscription
(I)	(inscription)	(wrote)

Postpositions

The use of post-position particles is also another feature of Uratian also present in the Yamato language.

Below are some of the examples of post-position particals in the Yamato that came from Urartian:

Urartian	Yamato	Meaning
-ni	-ni	to
-ne	-no	from, of, belonging to
-e	-e	to, for

I will cover a more in depth dive into the impact of Urartian grammar on the Yamato language here.

The Gimirri

With the above overview of the influence the languages of Urartian and Ancient Hebrew had on the formation of the Yamato language, let us dive deeper into the transitions from these original languages to what became the language that was used by this branch of "The House of Ghomri", also known as the Gimirri or the Cimmerians (i.e. proto-Ural-Altaic, of which the Yamato language was an early offshoot). Although I will only briefly cover the history here, I will say that the account from Herodotus only covers their activities surrounding the Caucasus region as well as the Asia Minor campaign, and speaks nothing of the north and eastern expansion which they undertook after defeating Sargon II in battle. The historical record of them is later picked up by the Chinese sources under different titles which they used to describe the various Eurasian Steppe Confederacies.

In the next section we will dive deeper into the discussion Urartian grammar and the impact on the Yamato language.

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¹ Haruhiko Kindaiichi, "The Japanese Language", p.13.