Nevertheless the poetry of the two great Far Eastern languages has its charm, especially the early poetry of Japan, but that charm, depending as it does largely upon suggestiveness rather than definite statement, and upon characteristic form and decoration rather than content, can only be felt by those who are able to read the texts. The Japanese texts, apart from the labour of decipherment, in themselves present no difficulty, once their simple grammar and construction understood, and in their romanized dress, with the brief grammar that is now subjoined, and the other aids offered in the present volume and its accompanying volume of translations are, it is hoped, made accessible to the English reader who cannot give several years to the acquisition of the complicated scripts which Dai Nippon has taken over, by necessity rather than choice, from the Middle Kingdom. The following sketch of the grammar of Old Japanese is intended merely to elucidate the texts, principally those of the Manyôshiu and the Taketori.[1] By Old Japanese is meant the unsinicized language of the Kojiki and Nihongi (as read _japonicé_) and particularly of the _uta_ quoted in those works, of the _norito_ or rituals, and of the texts above mentioned. There are no texts illustrating earlier stages of the language, and all etymologies are doubtful, both on that account and because the elements of Old Japanese are mere agglutinations (more or less contracted) of only sixty-four open syllables. Japanese (by which expression Old Japanese is here always intended) has no affinity with Chinese, a language consisting of disconnected elements (simple or compound), for in it agglutination has to some extent contracted into inflexion or quasi-inflexion, and it possesses in addition a large number of particles which give it a plasticity not found in Chinese. In my opinion, had the development of Japanese not been arrested by Chinese influences about the middle of the first millennium, it might have won a far higher place than it occupies in the hierarchy of human speech. This agglutinative inflexion is practically confined to the verb, and--to a slight extent--to nouns adjective, simple or verbalized. What may be called the stem of the verb shows a pure vocalic inflexion in _a_, _e_, _i_, _o_ or _u_. The stem in _u_ is the form usually found in native and foreign dictionaries--in Lemaréchal’s it is the stem in _e_ or _i_. To the stem the various locutions are suffixed to construct the forms representing, logically, moods and tenses as well as negative, causative, and potential-passive ‘voices’.