In the introduction to his grammar of literary Japanese, published in 1877, W. G. Aston said of the relation of spoken to written Japanese: ‘The spoken dialect of Japan differs so considerably in its grammar from the written idiom that it almost deserves to be regarded as a new language.’ A few years later B. H. Chamberlain said: ‘The business of life—whether in books, letters, or newspapers—is consistently carried on in a dialect ... whose grammar differs notably from that of spoken speech.’ And in his Handbook of Colloquial Japanese, he stressed the distinction thus: ‘A peculiarly intricate system of writing is not the sole barrier that divides the Colloquial from the language of books. The Japanese, like other Easterners, still remain at the stage in which we were during the Middle Ages—they do not write as they speak, but use an antiquated and partly artificial dialect whenever they put pen to paper. This is the so-called “Written Language”.’