the use of particles similar to English prepositions. Inflection plays no role in the grammar. Morphemes are typically one syllable in length and combine to form words without modification to their phonetic structures (tone excepted). Conversely, the basic structure of a transitive Japanese sentence is SOV, with the usual syntactic features associated with languages of this typology, including post positions, that is, grammar particles that appear after the words and phrases to which they apply. He lists four major Japanese problems: word order, parsing which Chinese characters should be read together, deciding how to pronounce the characters, and finding suitable equivalents for Chinese function words. According to John Timothy Wixted, scholars have disregarded kanbun. In terms of its size, often its quality, and certainly its importance both at the time it was written and cumulatively in the cultural tradition, kanbun is arguably the biggest and most important area of Japanese literary study that has been ignored in recent times, and the one least properly represented as part of the canon. A new development in kanbun studies is the Web-accessible database being developed by scholars at Nishōgakusha University in Tokyo. Conventions and terminology The Japanese word originally meant "Classical Chinese writings, Chinese classic texts, Classical Chinese literature". Compositions written in kanbun used two common types of Japanese readings: Sino-Japanese on'yomi ( "pronunciation readings") borrowed from Chinese pronunciations and native Japanese from Japanese equivalents. For example, can be read as dō adapted from Middle Chinese /dấw/ or as michi from the indigenous Japanese word meaning "road, street". Kanbun implemented two particular types of kana: , "kana suffixes added to kanji stems to show their Japanese readings" and , "smaller kana syllables printed/written alongside kanji to indicate pronunciation". It is important to note these were used primarily as reinforcements to the Kanbun writing. Kanbun – as opposed to meaning "Japanese text, composition written with Japanese syntax and predominately kun'yomi readings" – is subdivided into several types. "Chinese text, composition written with Chinese syntax and on'yomi Chinese characters" "unpunctuated kanbun text without reading aids" "Sino-Japanese composition written with Japanese syntax and mixed on'yomi and kun'yomi readings" "Chinese modified with Japanese syntax; a Japanized version of classical Chinese" Jean-Noël Robert describes kanbun as a "perfectly frozen, 'dead,' language" that was continuously used from the late Heian Period until after World War II. Classical Chinese, which, as we have seen, had long since ceased to be