A is a form of
Classical Chinese
Classical Chinese, also known as Literary Chinese (古文 ''gǔwén'' "ancient text", or 文言 ''wényán'' "text speak", meaning
"literary language/speech"; modern vernacular: 文言文 ''wényánwén'' "text speak text", meaning
"literar ...
used in Japan from the
Nara period
The of the history of Japan covers the years from CE 710 to 794. Empress Genmei established the capital of Heijō-kyō (present-day Nara). Except for a five-year period (740–745), when the capital was briefly moved again, it remained the c ...
to the mid-20th century. Much of
Japanese literature
Japanese literature throughout most of its history has been influenced by cultural contact with neighboring Asian literatures, most notably China and its literature. Early texts were often written in pure Classical Chinese or , a Chinese-Japanes ...
was written in this style and it was the general writing style for official and intellectual works throughout the period. As a result,
Sino-Japanese vocabulary
Sino-Japanese vocabulary, also known as refers to Japanese vocabulary that had originated in Chinese or were created from elements borrowed from Chinese. Some grammatical structures and sentence patterns can also be identified as Sino-Japanese. S ...
makes up a large portion of the
Japanese
Japanese may refer to:
* Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia
* Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan
* Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture
** Japanese diaspor ...
lexicon and much classical Chinese literature is accessible to Japanese readers in some semblance of the original. The corresponding system in Korean is ''
gugyeol
Gugyeol, also ''kwukyel'', is a system for rendering texts written in Classical Chinese into understandable Korean. It was chiefly used during the Joseon Dynasty, when readings of the Chinese classics were of paramount social importance. Thus ...
'' ().
History
The
Japanese writing system
The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana. Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalised Japane ...
originated through adoption and adaptation of
Written Chinese
Written Chinese () comprises Chinese characters used to represent the Chinese language. Chinese characters do not constitute an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Rather, the writing system is roughly logosyllabic; that is, a character generally r ...
. Some of Japan's oldest books (e.g., ''
Nihon Shoki'') and dictionaries (e.g., ''
Tenrei Banshō Meigi'' and ''
Wamyō Ruijushō
The is a 938 CE Japanese dictionary of Chinese characters. The Heian period scholar Minamoto no Shitagō (源順, 911–983 CE) began compilation in 934, at the request of Emperor Daigo's daughter. This ''Wamyō ruijushō'' title is abbreviate ...
'') were written in ''kanbun''. Other Japanese literary genres have parallels; the ''
Kaifūsō'' is the oldest collection of "Chinese poetry composed by Japanese poets".
Burton Watson
Burton Dewitt Watson (June 13, 1925April 1, 2017) was an American sinologist, translator, and writer known for his English translations of Chinese and Japanese literature.Stirling 2006, pg. 92 Watson's translations received many awards, includi ...
's English translations of ''kanbun'' compositions provide an introduction to this literary field.
Samuel Martin coined the term "
Sino-Xenic" in 1953 to describe Chinese as written in Japan, Korea, and other "foreign" (hence "-xenic") zones on China's periphery.
Roy Andrew Miller
Roy Andrew Miller (September 5, 1924 – August 22, 2014) was an American linguist best known as the author of several books on Japanese language and linguistics, and for his advocacy of Korean and Japanese as members of the proposed Altai ...
notes that although Japanese ''kanbun'' conventions have
Sino-Xenic parallels with other traditions for reading Classical Chinese like
Korean
Korean may refer to:
People and culture
* Koreans, ethnic group originating in the Korean Peninsula
* Korean cuisine
* Korean culture
* Korean language
**Korean alphabet, known as Hangul or Chosŏn'gŭl
**Korean dialects and the Jeju language
** ...
''
hanmun'' () and
Vietnamese
Vietnamese may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Vietnam, a country in Southeast Asia
** A citizen of Vietnam. See Demographics of Vietnam.
* Vietnamese people, or Kinh people, a Southeast Asian ethnic group native to Vietnam
** Overse ...
''
Hán Văn
Literary Chinese ( Vietnamese: 文言, 古文 or 漢文) was the medium of all formal writing in Vietnam for almost all of the history of the country up to the early 20th century, when it was replaced by vernacular writing in Vietnamese using ...
'' (), only ''kanbun'' has survived into the present day. He explains how
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.
''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 isolating language
An isolating language is a type of language with a morpheme per word ratio close to one, and with no inflectional morphology whatsoever. In the extreme case, each word contains a single morpheme. Examples of widely spoken isolating language ...
. Its grammatical relations are identified in subject–verb–object (SVO) order and through the use of particles
In the physical sciences, a particle (or corpuscule in older texts) is a small localized object which can be described by several physical or chemical properties, such as volume, density, or mass.
They vary greatly in size or quantity, from s ...
similar to English prepositions
English prepositions are words – such as ''of'', ''in'', ''on'', ''at'', ''from'', etc. – that function as the head of a prepositional phrase, and most characteristically license a noun phrase object (e.g., ''in the water''). Semantically, t ...
. 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
In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how different languages employ different orders. C ...
, parsing which Chinese characters should be read together, deciding how to pronounce the characters, and finding suitable equivalents for Chinese
function words
In linguistics, function words (also called functors) are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning and express grammatical relationships among other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker. ...
.
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
Classical Chinese, also known as Literary Chinese (古文 ''gǔwén'' "ancient text", or 文言 ''wényán'' "text speak", meaning
"literary language/speech"; modern vernacular: 文言文 ''wényánwén'' "text speak text", meaning
"literar ...
writings,
Chinese classic texts
Chinese classic texts or canonical texts () or simply dianji (典籍) refers to the Chinese texts which originated before the imperial unification by the Qin dynasty in 221 BC, particularly the "Four Books and Five Classics" of the Neo-Confucia ...
, Classical
Chinese literature".
Compositions written in ''kanbun'' used two common types of Japanese readings: Sino-Japanese ''
on'yomi
are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequ ...
'' ( "pronunciation readings") borrowed from Chinese pronunciations and native Japanese from Japanese equivalents. For example, can be read as ''dō'' adapted from
Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese (formerly known as Ancient Chinese) or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese recorded in the '' Qieyun'', a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expanded editions. The ...
/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
Jean-Noël Alexandre Robert (born 30 December 1949 in Paris) is a French orientalist, specialist of the history of Buddhism in Japan and of its Chinese predecessors. His work particularly focus on Tendai and the philology of Sino-Japanese Buddhis ...
describes ''kanbun'' as a "perfectly frozen,
'dead,' language" that was continuously used from the late
Heian Period
The is the last division of classical Japanese history, running from 794 to 1185. It followed the Nara period, beginning when the 50th emperor, Emperor Kanmu, moved the capital of Japan to Heian-kyō (modern Kyoto). means "peace" in Japan ...
until after World War II.
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.
Inasmuch as Classical Chinese was originally unpunctuated, the ''kanbun'' tradition developed various conventional reading punctuation, diacritical, and syntactic markers.
* "guiding marks for rendering Chinese into Japanese"
* "the Japanese reading/pronunciation of a ''kanji'' character"
* "a Japanese reading of a Chinese passage"
* "diacritical dots on characters to indicate Japanese grammatical inflections"
* "punctuation marks (e.g., 、comma and 。 period)"
* "marks placed alongside characters indicating their Japanese ordering is to be 'returned' (read in reverse)"
''Kaeriten'' grammatically transform Classical Chinese into Japanese word order. Two are syntactic symbols, the , "linking mark" denotes phrases composed of more than one characters, and the
denotes "return/reverse marks". The rest are ''kanji'' commonly used in numbering and ordering systems: 4 numerals ''ichi'' "one", ''ni'' "two", ''san'' "three", and ''yon'' "four"; 3 locatives ''ue'' "top", ''naka''
中 "middle", and ''shita'' "bottom"; 4
Heavenly Stems ''kinoe'' "first", ''kinoto'' "second", ''hinoe'' "third", and ''hinoto'' "fourth";
and the 3 cosmological ''ten'' "heaven", ''chi'' "earth", and ''jin'' "person". For written English, these ''kaeriten'' would correspond with 1, 2, 3; I, II, III; A, B, C, etc.
As an analogy for ''kanbun'' "mentally changing the word order" from Chinese sentences with
subject–verb–object (SVO) into Japanese
subject–object–verb (SOV),
John DeFrancis
John DeFrancis (August 31, 1911January 2, 2009) was an American linguist, sinologist, author of Chinese language textbooks, lexicographer of Chinese dictionaries, and Professor Emeritus of Chinese Studies at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa ...
gives this example of using an English (another SVO language) literal translation to render the Latin (another SOV) ''
Commentarii de Bello Gallico
''Commentarii de Bello Gallico'' (; en, Commentaries on the Gallic War, italic=yes), also ''Bellum Gallicum'' ( en, Gallic War, italic=yes), is Julius Caesar's firsthand account of the Gallic Wars, written as a third-person narrative. In it C ...
'' opening.
DeFrancis adds, "A better analogy would be the reverse situation–Caesar rendering an English text in his native language and adding Latin case endings."
Two English textbooks for students of ''kanbun'' are ''An Introduction to Kambun'' by Sydney Crawcour, reviewed by Marian Ury in 1990, and ''An Introduction to Japanese Kanbun'' by Komai and Rohlich, reviewed by Andrew Markus in 1990 and Wixted in 1998.
Example
![Kaeriten](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/Kaeriten.png)
The illustration to the right exemplifies ''kanbun''. These eight words comprise the well-known first line in the
Han Feizi
The ''Han Feizi'' or ''Hanfeizi'' (" ritings ofMaster Han Fei") is an ancient Chinese text named for its attribution to the political philosopher Han Fei. It comprises a selection of essays in the Legalist tradition on theories of state power, ...
story (chap. 36, 難一 "Collection of Difficulties, No. 1") that first coined the term ''máodùn'' (Japanese ''mujun'', 'contradiction, inconsistency', lit. "spear-shield"
), illustrating the
irresistible force paradox. Debating with a
Confucianist
Confucianism, also known as Ruism or Ru classicism, is a system of thought and behavior originating in ancient China. Variously described as tradition, a philosophy, a religion, a humanistic or rationalistic religion, a way of governing, or ...
about the legendary Chinese sage rulers
Yao and
Shun
Shun may refer to one of the following:
*To shun, which means avoiding association with an individual or group
* Shun (given name), a masculine Japanese given name
*Seasonality in Japanese cuisine (''shun'', 旬)
Emperor Shun
* Emperor Shun ( ...
,
legalist Han Fei argues that you cannot praise them both because you would be making a "spear-shield" contradiction.
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 present-day
Mandarin
Mandarin or The Mandarin may refer to:
Language
* Mandarin Chinese, branch of Chinese originally spoken in northern parts of the country
** Standard Chinese or Modern Standard Mandarin, the official language of China
** Taiwanese Mandarin, Stand ...
pronunciation:
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'' 'one who, somebody who', which works as
nominalizer marking a verb phrase as certain kinds of
noun phrase
In linguistics, a noun phrase, or nominal (phrase), is a phrase that has a noun or pronoun as its head or performs the same grammatical function as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently oc ...
s.
The original Chinese sentence is marked with five Japanese ''kaeriten'' as:
:
To interpret this, the word 'existed' marked with ''shita'' 下 'bottom' is shifted to the location marked by ''ue'' 'top'. Likewise, the word 'sell' marked with ''ni'' 'two' is shifted to the location marked by ''ichi'' 'one'. The ''re'' 'reverse' mark indicates that the order of the adjacent characters must be reversed. Or, to represent this ''kanbun'' reading in numerical terms:
Following these ''kanbun'' instructions step by step transforms the sentence so it has the typical Japanese
subject–object–verb argument order. The Sino-Japanese ''on'yomi'' readings and meanings are:
Next, Japanese function words and conjugations can be added with ''okurigana'', and Japanese ''to ... to'' "and" can substitute Chinese "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)'' 'sell, deal in', a literary character which is included in neither the
Kyōiku kanji
, also known as is a list of 1,026 kanji and associated readings developed and maintained by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (Japan), Japanese Ministry of Education that prescribes which kanji, and which readin ...
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- 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.
:
The completed ''kundoku'' translation with ''kun'yomi'' reads as a well-formed Japanese sentence:
Coming full circle, this annotated Japanese ''kanbun'' example back-translates: "Among Chu people, there existed one who was selling shields and spears".
Unicode
Kanbun were added to the
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...
Standard in June 1993 with the release of version 1.1.
Alan Wood (linked below) says: "The Japanese word ''kanbun'' refers to classical Chinese writing as used in Japan. The characters in this range are used to indicate the order in which words should be read in these Chinese texts."
Two Unicode ''kaeriten'' are grammatical symbols () for "linking marks" and "reverse marks". The others are organizational ''kanji'' for: numbers () "1, 2, 3, 4"; locatives () "top, middle, bottom"; Heavenly Stems () "1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th"; and levels () "heaven, earth, person".
The Unicode block for kanbun is U+3190–U+319F:
See also
*
Gugyeol
Gugyeol, also ''kwukyel'', is a system for rendering texts written in Classical Chinese into understandable Korean. It was chiefly used during the Joseon Dynasty, when readings of the Chinese classics were of paramount social importance. Thus ...
*
Idu script
Idu (이두, hanja : , meaning ''official's reading'') is an archaic writing system that represents the Korean language using hanja. The script, which was developed by Buddhist monks, made it possible to record Korean words through its equiva ...
*
Interlinear gloss
In linguistics and pedagogy, an interlinear gloss is a gloss (series of brief explanations, such as definitions or pronunciations) placed between lines, such as between a line of original text and its translation into another language. When gloss ...
*
Wakan Konko Bun
References
Citations
Bibliography
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External links
Kanbun in Unicode Alan Wood
International Research Project Based on Kanbun Sources to Reconstruct a View of Japanese Culture Nishōgakusha University
{{Japanese language
Archaic Japanese language
Japanese writing system
Reordered languages
Classical Chinese