is an early 17th century Portuguese

Portugal

Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...

 grammar

Japanese grammar

The Japanese language has a regular agglutinative verb morphology, with both productive and fixed elements. In language typology, it has many features divergent from most European languages. Its phrases are exclusively head-final and compound sentences are exclusively left-branching. There are many...

 of the Japanese language

Japanese language

is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

. It was compiled by João Rodrigues, a Portuguese missionary of the Society of Jesus

Society of Jesus

The Society of Jesus is a Catholic male religious order that follows the teachings of the Catholic Church. The members are called Jesuits, and are also known colloquially as "God's Army" and as "The Company," these being references to founder Ignatius of Loyola's military background and a...

. It is the oldest complete Japanese grammar, and is a valuable reference for late Late Middle Japanese.

Background

Christian

Kirishitan

, from Portuguese cristão, referred to Roman Catholic Christians in Japanese and is used as a historiographic term for Roman Catholics in Japan in the 16th and 17th centuries. Christian missionaries were known as bateren or iruman...

 missionary work in Japan began in the 1540s. In an attempt to better communicate, the foreign missionaries attempted to learn Japanese. They created dictionaries

Nippo Jisho

The Nippo Jisho or Vocabvlario da Lingoa de Iapam was a Japanese to Portuguese dictionary published in Nagasaki, Japan in 1603. It contains entries for 32,293 Japanese words in Portuguese. Only four copies of the original 1603 edition exist...

 and grammars. Early grammars seem to have been written in the 1580s, but are no longer extant.

Arte da Lingoa de Iapam is the oldest extant complete Japanese grammar. Rodrigues published it in Nagasaki

Nagasaki

is the capital and the largest city of Nagasaki Prefecture on the island of Kyushu in Japan. Nagasaki was founded by the Portuguese in the second half of the 16th century on the site of a small fishing village, formerly part of Nishisonogi District...

 over a period of five years between 1604 and 1608. There are only two known copies: one at the Bodleian Library

Bodleian Library

The Bodleian Library , the main research library of the University of Oxford, is one of the oldest libraries in Europe, and in Britain is second in size only to the British Library...

 at the University of Oxford

University of Oxford

The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...

 and the other in the Crawford family collection.

In 1620, after being transferred to Macau

Macau

Macau , also spelled Macao , is, along with Hong Kong, one of the two special administrative regions of the People's Republic of China...

, Rodrigues compiled a shorter, simplified version of the grammar entitled .

Contents

The grammar is three volumes in length.

• Volume 1 is outline of fundamental Japanese grammar. It discusses the declension
  Declension
  In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number , case , and gender...
  
   of nouns
  Noun
  In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...
  
   and pronouns
  Japanese pronouns
  Pronouns are used less frequently in the Japanese language than in many other languages, mainly because there is no grammatical requirement to include the subject in a sentence. So, pronouns can seldomly be translated from English to Japanese on a one-on-one basis.The common, English pronouns, such...
  
   with respect to case
  Grammatical case
  In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun is an inflectional form that indicates its grammatical function in a phrase, clause, or sentence. For example, a pronoun may play the role of subject , of direct object , or of possessor...
  
   particles, the conjugation
  Grammatical conjugation
  In linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection . Conjugation may be affected by person, number, gender, tense, aspect, mood, voice, or other grammatical categories...
  
   of verbs
  Verb
  A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...
  
   with respect to mood
  Grammatical mood
  In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used to signal modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying...
  
   and tense
  Grammatical tense
  A tense is a grammatical category that locates a situation in time, to indicate when the situation takes place.Bernard Comrie, Aspect, 1976:6:...
  
  , categorizes the language into ten parts of speech
  Lexical category
  In grammar, a part of speech is a linguistic category of words , which is generally defined by the syntactic or morphological behaviour of the lexical item in question. Common linguistic categories include noun and verb, among others...
  
  , discusses honorifics
  Japanese honorifics
  The Japanese language has many honorifics, parts of speech which show respect, and their use is mandatory in many social situations. Honorifics in Japanese may be used to emphasize social distance or disparity in rank, or to emphasize social intimacy or similarity in rank.The system of honorifics...
  
  , as well as romanization orthography
  Romanization of Japanese
  The romanization of Japanese is the application of the Latin alphabet to write the Japanese language. This method of writing is known as , less strictly romaji, literally "Roman letters", sometimes incorrectly transliterated as romanji or rōmanji. There are several different romanization systems...
  
  .
• Volume 2 discusses syntax
  Syntax
  In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
  
  , rhetoric
  Rhetoric
  Rhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. As a subject of formal study and a productive civic practice, rhetoric has played a central role in the Western...
  
  , dialects
  Japanese dialects
  The comprise many regional variants. The lingua franca of Japan is called hyōjungo or kyōtsūgo , and while it was based initially on the Tokyo dialect, the language of Japan's capital has since gone in its own direction to become one of Japan's many dialects...
  
  , pronunciation
  Japanese phonology
  This article deals with the phonology of the Japanese language.-Consonants:The Japanese vowels are pronounced as monophthongs, unlike in English; except for , they are similar to their Spanish or Italian counterparts....
  
  , accent, and poetry
  Japanese poetry
  Japanese poets first encountered Chinese poetry during the Tang Dynasty. It took them several hundred years to digest the foreign impact, make it a part of their culture and merge it with their literary tradition in their mother tongue, and begin to develop the diversity of their native poetry. For...
  
  .
• Volume 3 describes how to read kanji
  Kanji
  Kanji are the adopted logographic Chinese characters hanzi that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana , katakana , Indo Arabic numerals, and the occasional use of the Latin alphabet...
  
  , documents, personal names
  Japanese name
  in modern times usually consist of a family name , followed by a given name. "Middle names" are not generally used.Japanese names are usually written in kanji, which are characters of usually Chinese origin in Japanese pronunciation...
  
  , and how to count Japanese years
  Japanese era name
  The Japanese era calendar scheme is a common calendar scheme used in Japan, which identifies a year by the combination of the and the year number within the era...
  
  and time.