Kanbun
| Kanbun kundoku | |
|---|---|
| 漢文訓読 | |
| Region | Literary Chinese
|
| Kanji, kana | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | lzh |
| Glottolog | None |
Kanbun (漢文 '
History
The Japanese writing system originated through adoption and adaptation of written Chinese. Some of Japan's oldest books (e.g. the Nihon Shoki) and dictionaries (e.g. the Tenrei Banshō Meigi and Wamyō Ruijushō) were written in kanbun. Other Japanese literary genres have parallels; the Kaifūsō is the oldest collection of kanshi (漢詩, 'Chinese poetry'). Burton Watson's English translations of kanbun compositions provide an introduction to this literary field.[1][2]
in the Japanese kanbun reading tradition a Chinese text is simultaneously punctuated, analyzed, and translated into classical Japanese. It operates according to a limited canon of Japanese forms and syntactic structures which are treated as existing in a one-to-one alignment with the vocabulary and structures of classical Chinese. At its worst, this system for reading Chinese as if it were Japanese became a kind of lazy schoolboy's trot to a classical text; at its best, it has preserved the analysis and interpretation of large body of literary Chinese texts which would otherwise have been completely lost; hence, the kanbun tradition can often be of great value for an understanding of early Chinese literature.
William C. Hannas points out the linguistic hurdles involved in kanbun transformation.[5]
Kanbun, literally "Chinese writing," refers to a genre of techniques for making Chinese texts read like Japanese, or for writing in a way imitative of Chinese. For a Japanese, neither of these tasks could be accomplished easily because of the two languages' different structures. As I have mentioned, Chinese is an
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:
According to John Timothy Wixted, scholars have disregarded kanbun.[6]
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 Nishogakusha University in Tokyo.[7][clarification needed]
Terminology
The Japanese word kanbun originally meant '
Kanbun implemented two particular types of kana. One was okurigana 'accompanying script', kana suffixes added to kanji stems to show their Japanese readings; the other was furigana 'brandishing script', smaller kana syllables written alongside kanji to indicate pronunciation. These were used primarily as reinforcements to writing in kanbun. Kanbun—as opposed to Wabun (和文, 'Wa writing'), Japanese text with Japanese syntax and predominately kun'yomi readings—is divided into several types:
- jun-kanbun (純漢文, 'genuine Chinese writing')
- Chinese text written with Chinese syntax and on'yomi characters
- hakubun (白文, 'blank writing')
- Kanbun without reading aids or punctuation
- Wakan konkō-bun
- Sino-Japanese composition written with Japanese syntax and mixed on'yomi and kun'yomi readings
- hentai-kanbun (変体漢文, 'variant form Chinese writing')
- Chinese modified with Japanese syntax, a "Japan-ized" version of Literary Chinese
Classical Chinese, which, as we have seen, had long since ceased to be a spoken language on the mainland (if indeed it had ever been), has been in use in the Japanese archipelago longer than the Japanese language itself. The oldest written remnants found in Japan are all in Chinese, though it is a matter of considerable debate whether traces of the Japanese vernacular are to be found in them. Taking both languages together until the end of the nineteenth century, and taking into account all the monastic documents, literature in the widest sense of the term, and texts in 'near-Chinese' (hentai-kanbun), it is entirely possible that the sheer volume of texts written in Chinese in Japan slightly exceed what was written in Japanese.
As Literary Chinese originally lacked punctuation, the kanbun tradition developed various conventional reading punctuation, diacritical, and syntactic markers.
- kunten (訓点, 'explanation mark')
- Guiding marks for rendering Chinese into Japanese
- kundoku (訓読, 'explanation reading')
- The Japanese reading of a kanji
- kanbun kundoku (漢文訓読, 'Chinese writing Japanese reading')
- A Japanese reading of a Chinese passage
- okototen (乎古止点, 'inflectional dot marks')
- Diacritical dots on characters to indicate Japanese grammatical inflections
- kutōten (句読点, 'phrase reading marks')
- Punctuation marks analogous to commas and full stops
- kaeriten (返り点, 'return marker')
- Marks placed alongside characters indicating their Japanese ordering is to be read in reverse
Kaeriten grammatically transforms Literary Chinese into Japanese word order. Two are syntactic symbols, the | tatesen (縦線, 'vertical bar')—linking mark that denotes phrases composed of more than one character, and the レ reten (レ点, '[katakana] re mark')[11] denotes 'reverse marks'. The rest are kanji commonly used in numbering and ordering systems:
- Four numerals: ichi 一 'one', ni 二 'two', san 三 'three', and yon 四 'four'
- Three locatives: ue 上 'top', naka 中 'middle', and shita 下 'bottom'
- Four Heavenly Stems: kinoe 甲 'first', kinoto 乙 'second', hinoe 丙 'third', and hinoto 丁 'fourth'[11][12]
- Three cosmological sansai (三才, 'three worlds'), see Wakan Sansai Zue: ten 天 'heaven', chi 地 'earth', and jin 人 'person'. For written English, these kaeriten would correspond with 1, 2, 3; I, II, III; A, B, C, etc.
As an analogy for kanbun changing the word order from Chinese sentences with
| Gallia | est | omnis | divisa | in | partes | tres |
| 2 | 3 | 1 | 4 | 5 | 7 | 6 |
| Gaul | is | all | divided | into | parts | three |
DeFrancis adds, "A better analogy would be the reverse situation–Caesar rendering an English text in his native language and adding Latin case endings."[14]
Two English textbooks for students of kanbun are An Introduction to Kambun by Sydney Crawcour,[15] reviewed by Marian Ury in 1990,[16] and An Introduction to Japanese Kanbun by Komai and Rohlich, reviewed by Andrew Markus in 1990[17] and Wixted[further explanation needed] in 1998.[18]
Example
The illustration to the right exemplifies kanbun. These eight words comprise the well-known first line in the
Among the Chu, there was a man selling shields and spears. He praised the former saying, "My shields are so solid nothing can penetrate them". Then he would praise his spears saying, "My spears are so sharp that among all things there's nothing they can't penetrate". Somebody else said, "If somebody tried to penetrate your shields with your spears, what would happen?" The man could not respond.
The first sentence would read thus, using modern Standard Chinese pronunciation:
| 楚 | 人 | 有 | 鬻 | 盾 | 與 | 矛 | 者 |
| Chǔ | rén | yǒu | yù | dùn | yǔ | máo | zhě |
| Chu | person | exist | sell | shield | and | spear | NMZ |
A fairly literal translation would be "among Chu people, there existed somebody who was selling shields and spears". All words can be literally translated into English, except for the final particle zhě 者 'one who', 'somebody who', which works as
楚人有下鬻二盾與一レ矛者上
To interpret this, the word 有 'existed' marked with shita 下 'bottom' is shifted to the location marked by ue 上 'top'. Likewise, the word 鬻 'sell' marked with ni 二 'two' is shifted to the location marked by ichi 一 'one'. The re レ 'reverse' mark indicates that the order of the adjacent characters must be reversed. To represent this reading in numerical terms:
| 楚 | 人 | 有 | 鬻 | 盾 | 與 | 矛 | 者 |
| 1 | 2 | 8 | 6 | 3 | 5 | 4 | 7 |
Following these kanbun instructions step by step transforms the sentence so it has the typical Japanese
| 楚 | 人 | 盾 | 矛 | 與 | 鬻 | 者 | 有 |
| So | jin | jun | mu | yo | iku | sha | yū |
| Chu | person | shield | spear | and | sell | NMZ | exist |
Next, Japanese function words and conjugations can be added with okurigana, and Japanese to ... to と...と 'and' can substitute Chinese 與 'and'. More specifically, the first と is treated as an additional function word, and the second, the reading of 與:
Lastly, kun'yomi readings for characters can be annotated with furigana. Normally furigana are only used for uncommon kanji or unusual readings. This sentence's only uncommon kanji is hisa(gu) 鬻ぐ 'sell', 'deal in', a literary character which is included in neither the kyōiku kanji nor the jōyō kanji lists. However, in kanbun texts it is relatively common to use a large amount of furigana—often there is an interest in recovering the readings used by people of the Heian or Nara periods, and since many kanji can be read either with on'yomi or kun'yomi pronunciations in a kanbun text, the furigana can show at least one editor's opinion of how it may have been read.
楚人に盾と矛とを鬻ぐ者有り
The completed kundoku translation reads as a well-formed Japanese sentence with kun'yomi:
| 楚 | 人 | に | 盾 | と | 矛 | と | を | 鬻 | ぐ | 者 | 有 | り |
| So | hito | ni | tate | to | hoko | 'to | o | hisa | gu' | mono | a | ri |
| Chu | people | among | shields | and | spears | and | OBJ | sell- | ing | -er | exist- | s |
This annotated kanbun translates to, "among Chu people, there existed one who was selling shields and spears".
Unicode
Kanbun were added to the Unicode Standard in June 1993 with version 1.1. Two Unicode kaeriten are grammatical symbols (㆐㆑) for linking and reverse marks. The others are the organizational kanji for numerals (e.g. ㆒), locatives (e.g. ㆖), Heavenly Stems (e.g. ㆙), and levels (e.g. ㆝).
The Unicode block for kanbun is U+3190..319F:
| Kanbun[1] Official Unicode Consortium code chart (PDF) | ||||||||||||||||
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | A | B | C | D | E | F | |
| U+319x | ㆐ | ㆑ | ㆒ | ㆓ | ㆔ | ㆕ | ㆖ | ㆗ | ㆘ | ㆙ | ㆚ | ㆛ | ㆜ | ㆝ | ㆞ | ㆟ |
Notes
| ||||||||||||||||
See also
- Gugyeol
- Idu script
- Interlinear gloss
- Chữ Nôm
- Wakan Konko Bun
References
- ^ Watson 1975.
- ^ Watson 1976.
- OL 12798716M.
Martin coined the term 'Sino-Xenic' as a label for Sino-X (Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean, Sino-Vietnamese and so on).
- ^ Miller (1967:31)
- ^ Hannas (1997:32)
- ^ Wixted (1998:23)
- ^ Kamichi & Machi 2006.
- ^ ISBN 978-4-385-13905-0.
- ^ Database query to Chinese characters: 道, uses Sergei Starostin's romanization system.
- ^ Robert (2006)
- ^ OL 7302036W.
- ^ Crawcour (1965:xvi–xvii)
- ^ DeFrancis (1989:132)
- ^ DeFrancis (1989:133)
- ^ Crawcour (1965)
- ^ Ury 1990.
- ^ Markus 1990.
- ^ Komai & Rohlich (1988)
- ^ Pulleyblank (1995:66)
Sources
- Aldridge, Edith (2013). "Principles of Hentai Kanbun Word Order: Evidence from the Kojiki". In McAuley, Thomas E. (ed.). Language Change in East Asia. Routledge. pp. 207–232. OL 33614908M.
- Crawcour, Sydney (1965). An Introduction to Kambun. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Center for Japanese Studies. OL 16806692W.
- OL 2186641M.
- Frellesvig, Bjarke (2010). A History of the Japanese Language. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-139-48880-8.
- Hannas, William C. (1997). Asia's Orthographic Dilemma. University of Hawaiʻi Press. OL 1004659M.
- Kamichi, Kōichi; Machi, Senjurō (2006). 二松学舎大学 日本漢文文献目録データベース [The Kambun Database at Nishôgakusha University] (in Japanese). Nishôgakusha University.
- Komai, Akira; Rohlich, Thomas H. (1988). An Introduction to Japanese Kanbun. University of Nagoya Press. OL 13593808M.
- Markus, Andrew (1990). "Review Essay: Akira Komai and Thomas H. Rohlich. An Introduction to Japanese Kanbun" (PDF). Sino-Japanese Studies. 3 (1): 60–63.
- OL 1753446W.
- OL 3119669W.
- S2CID 171363016. Archived from the original(PDF) on 2011-06-01. Retrieved 2011-01-04.
- Schreiber, Gordian (2022). Japanese Morphography: Deconstructing hentai kanbun. Language, Writing and Literary Culture in the Sinographic Cosmopolis. Vol. 4. Brill. S2CID 240583185.
- Ury, Marian (1990). "Learning Kanbun". The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese. 24 (1). American Association of Teachers of Japanese: 137–138. JSTOR 489242.
- OL 10195445M.
- ——— (1976). Japanese Literature in Chinese: Poetry and Prose in Chinese by Japanese Writers of the Later Period. Vol. 2. Columbia University Press. OL 10195473M.
- Wixted, John Timothy (1998). "Kanbun, Histories of Japanese Literature, and Japanologists" (PDF). Sino-Japanese Studies. 10 (2): 23–31.
- Wu, Kuang-ming (1997). On Chinese Body Thinking: A Cultural Hermeneutic. Brill. OL 9076518M.
External links
