Cary Weston, age 16, of Champaign, Ill., for his question:

IS JAPANESE RELATED TO OTHER ASIAN LANGUAGES?

Japanese is the language spoken by the inhabitants of Japan and by Japanese people living in other parts of the world. It is also widely spoken as a second language by Chinese and Korean people. No certain relation between Japanese and other languages has been established.

Structural similarities suggest a possible remote relationship between Japanese and Korean, and with the Altaic languages, including Manchu, Mongolian and Turkish. Many scholars doubt this theory, however, because of the lack of common vocabulary.

Compared with the Indo European languages, Japanese appears vague and imprecise. The Japanese seem to prefer a certain kind of imprecision to precision and they deliberately phrase their sentences vaguely.

Originally the Japanese vocabulary was extremely limited. Beginning in the 3rd century A.D., however, a large number of Chinese words were incorporated into the language. The number of words in present day Japanese that were originally Chinese is much greater than the number of native Japanese words.

Japanese has also borrowed many words from European languages during the past 100 years, mostly from English. This process has been greatly accelerated in the post World War II period.

Probably the linguistic feature that more than any other distinguishes Japanese from other languages is the large number of polite, honorific and humilific words and of word forms such as prefixes and suffices. Only Korean and Javanese contain a compdrable number of words indicating status.

The ancient Japanese had no writing system of their own. They first learned to write about 1,500 years ago, when the Chinese and Koreans taught them the Chinese method of writing by characters, or ideograms. Because each Chinese character represents one particular word, it was difficult to use characters for the highly inflected words of the Japanese language.

For a long period the Japanese followed the Chinese method, but by the 8th century A.D. they were using Chinese characters as phonetic symbols, each representing one syllable. In the 9th century the Chinese characters were abbreviated to create the two native "kana" syllabaries, so called because the Japanese world "kana" denotes a symbol that represents a syllable. In these syllabaries, each syllable is represented by a symbol derived from a more complex Chinese character.

The use of Chinese characters led to the introduction of  great number of Chinese words into the Japanese vocabulary. After World War II the number of Chinese characters in common use was reduced to 1,850, thereby simplifying the written language considerably.

The Japanese language has a simple phonology consisting of only five vowels, which are Romanized as a, i, u, a and o and are pronounced somewhat as in Italian.

There are 19 consonants that are pronounced rather like the corresponding    English consonants: k, s, sh, t, ch, ts, n, h, f, m, y, r, w, g, z, j, d, b and p.