The is a 12th-century

Japanese dictionary have a history that began over 1300 years ago when Japanese Buddhist priests, who wanted to understand Chinese sutras, adapted Chinese character dictionaries. Present-day Japanese lexicographers are exploring computerized editing and electronic d ...

of ''

Kanji are logographic Chinese characters, adapted from Chinese family of scripts, Chinese script, used in the writing of Japanese language, Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are ...

'' ("Chinese characters"). It was the first

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 Kammu, moved the capital of Japan to Heian-kyō (modern Kyoto). means in Japanese. It is a ...

dictionary to

collate Collation is the assembly of written information into a standard order. Many systems of collation are based on numerical order or alphabetical order, or extensions and combinations thereof. Collation is a fundamental element of most office fil ...

characters by pronunciation (in the ''

iroha The is a Japanese poem. Originally the poem was attributed to Kūkai, the founder of Shingon Buddhism, but more modern research has found the date of composition to be later in the Heian period (794–1179). The first record of its existence ...

'' order) rather than by logographic

radical Radical (from Latin: ', root) may refer to: Politics and ideology Politics *Classical radicalism, the Radical Movement that began in late 18th century Britain and spread to continental Europe and Latin America in the 19th century *Radical politics ...

(like the '' Tenrei Banshō Meigi'') or word meaning (''

Wamyō Ruijushō The is a 938 CE Japanese dictionary of Chinese characters. Heian period scholar Minamoto no Shitagō (源順, 911–983 CE) began compilation in 934, at the request of Emperor Daigo's daughter. The title is abbreviated as , and is also spelle ...

''). The ''Iroha Jiruishō'' has a complex history (see Okimori 1996:8-11) involving editions of two, three, and ten fascicles (''kan'' 卷 "scroll; volume"). The original 2-fascicle edition was compiled by an unknown editor in late Heian era circa 1144-1165 CE. This was followed by a 3-fascicle edition by Tachibana Tadakane (橘忠兼) circa 1177-1188. Finally, at the start of the

Kamakura Period The is a period of History of Japan, Japanese history that marks the governance by the Kamakura shogunate, officially established in 1192 in Kamakura, Kanagawa, Kamakura by the first ''shōgun'' Minamoto no Yoritomo after the conclusion of the G ...

, another anonymous editor compiled the expanded 10-fascicle edition, entitled 伊呂波字類抄 (with ''Iroha'' written 伊呂波 instead of 色葉). The main character entries are annotated with ''

katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived fr ...

'' to indicate both ''

on'yomi , or the Sino-Japanese vocabulary, Sino-Japanese reading, is the reading of a kanji based on the historical Chinese pronunciation of the character. A single kanji might have multiple ''on'yomi'' pronunciations, reflecting the Chinese pronuncia ...

'' Sino-Japanese borrowings and ''

kun'yomi is the way of reading kanji characters using the native Japanese word that matches the meaning of the Chinese character when it was introduced. This pronunciation is contrasted with ''on'yomi'', which is the reading based on the original Chi ...

'' native Japanese pronunciations. The ''Iroha Jiruishō'' orthography shows that 12th-century Japanese continued to phonetically distinguish

voiceless In linguistics, voicelessness is the property of sounds being pronounced without the larynx vibrating. Phonologically, it is a type of phonation, which contrasts with other states of the larynx, but some object that the word phonation implies v ...

and

voiced Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced. The term, however, is used to refe ...

sounds, but the distinction between /zi/ and /di/, /zu/ and /du/, and /eu/ and /ou/ was being lost. These entry words typify the Japanized version of

classical Chinese Classical Chinese is the language in which the classics of Chinese literature were written, from . For millennia thereafter, the written Chinese used in these works was imitated and iterated upon by scholars in a form now called Literary ...

known as ''hentai Kanbun'' (変体漢文 "anomalous Chinese writing", see ''

Azuma Kagami is a Japanese historical chronicle. The medieval text chronicles events of the Kamakura Shogunate from Minamoto no Yoritomo's rebellion against the Taira clan in Izokuni of 1180 to Munetaka Shinnō (the 6th shōgun) and his return to Kyoto in ...

'') or ''Wakan konkōbun'' (和漢混交文 "mixed Japanese and Chinese writing"). This is a bilingual dictionary for looking up Chinese characters in terms of their Japanese pronunciation, and not a true Japanese language dictionary. The ''Iroha jiruishō'' inventively groups entries by their first mora into 47 phonetic sections (部門) like ''i'' (伊), ''ro'' (呂), and ''ha'' (波); each subdivided into 21 semantic headings shown in the table below. Most of these 21 headings are self-explanatory semantic fields, with the exceptions of 13 ''Jiji'' for miscellaneous words written with a single character, 14 ''Jūten'' reduplicative compounds (e.g., ''ji-ji'' 時時, literally "time time", "at times, occasionally"), and 15 ''Jōji'' synonym compounds (e.g., ''kanryaku'' 簡略, literally "simple simple", "simplicity, conciseness"). These 21 ''Iroha jiruishō'' headings can be compared with the 24 used two centuries earlier in the ''

''. Unlike all the other major Heian Japanese dictionaries that followed

Chinese dictionary There are two types of dictionaries regularly used in the Chinese language: list individual Chinese characters, and list words and phrases. Because tens of thousands of characters have been used in written Chinese, Chinese lexicographers have d ...

traditions, the ''Iroha Jiruishōs phonetic ordering can undoubtedly be interpreted, says Don C. Bailey (1960:16), "as a sign of increasing independence from Chinese cultural influences." Most subsequent Japanese dictionaries, excepting ''kanji'' ones, were internally organized by pronunciation.

References

*Bailey, Don Clifford. (1960). "Early Japanese Lexicography". ''Monumenta Nipponica'' 16:1-52. *Nakada Norio 中田祝夫, ed. (1977). ''Iroha jirui shō kenkyū narabini sōgō sakuin'' (色葉字類抄研究並びに總合索引 "Research and a General Index for the ''Iroha Jiruishō''). Tokyo : Kazama Shobō. *Kaneko Akira 金子彰. (1996). "色葉字類抄・伊呂波字類抄 (''Iroha Jiruishō'')". In ''Nihon jisho jiten'' 日本辞書辞典 (''The Encyclopedia of Dictionaries Published in Japan''), Okimori Takuya 沖森卓也, et al., eds., pp. 8-11. Tokyo: Ōfū.

External links

色葉字類抄
online JPEG ''Iroha Jiruishō'' edition, Kyoto University Library *Manuscript scan at

Waseda University Library The collections of Waseda University Library (早稲田大学図書館; ''Waseda Daigaku Toshokan'') form one of the largest libraries in Japan. Established in 1882, they currently hold some 5.6 million volumes and 46,000 serials. History The W ...

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Iroha Jiruisho Japanese dictionaries Late Old Japanese texts 12th-century Japanese books Heian-period books