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Outline of Topics: Japanese syllabary; i-ro-ha arrangement; arrangement of fifty-sounds; modern inventions.—Chinese ideographs; Kata-kana; Hira-gana; Kana-majiri and Kana-tsuki; variety in pronunciation.—Japanese elocution.—Japanese syntax; logic in linguistics; a sample sentence; kind of language; topsy-turvy practices.—Ancient literature; poetry; naga-uta and tanka; hokku; a poem a picture.—Characteristics of Japanese poetry.—Modern literature: newspapers; press laws; English journals; Japanese journals; magazines and periodicals; books; what the Japanese read; their literary taste; foreign books; linguistic reforms, theory and practice.—Bibliography.

The Japanese language belongs, philologically, to the Altaic family, and is of the agglutinative type. Practically, it is musical and easy to pronounce, but, on account of its long and involved sentences, difficult to learn. Its alphabet is not phonetic, but syllabic, and very simple and regular. It comprises 73 characters, of which 5 are duplicates of the same sounds, so that there are really only 68 distinct sounds. As many of the sounds, moreover, are only slight modifications of other sounds, they are represented by the same characters, with certain diacritical signs attached (as in the case of ha, ba, and pa). There are, consequently, in common use only 48 distinct characters, which are