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Linguistics

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    @jogloran James K is referring to Kanbun, a system of marking Classical Chinese text so that it can be read aloud in Japanese, which tends to put verbs last. See Wikipedia's 楚人有鬻盾與矛者 example. Commented Jul 29, 2021 at 13:29
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    @Janus: if you check the edit history, the responder has just completely changed the topic of their post, which is a little rude. It used contain an inaccurate claim about Cantonese. Commented Jul 29, 2021 at 16:43
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    @jogloran Ah, I see! I wondered how Cantonese entered into this at all, but didn’t notice the edit that deleted that part of the answer. Commented Jul 29, 2021 at 16:44
  • Actually, I realised that this answer is still incorrect — is it really true that "Japanese was once written as Chinese"? I would say no. Kanbun is a completely separate style to Japanese prose. The source text in Kanbun is Chinese, through and through. Commented Jul 29, 2021 at 17:05
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    The source is Japanese, as there are indications on reading which indicate that a Japanse reading is intended for some characters. The order of the characters is Chinese, and doesn't match the reading order, so markers are added to indicate the reading order. When read, you read according to the indicated order, not the page order. The underlying language is Japanese. Commented Jul 29, 2021 at 17:15