Paper short abstract:

The paper is going to examine to what extent the Classical Japanese poems called mono no na 物の名, i.e. 'names of things', can be used as a source of linguistic information. This will discussed by means of two examples, one lexical and one phonetic.

Paper long abstract:

The paper is going to draw Western Japanologists' attention to a rather marginal type of Classical Japanese poems called mono no na 物の名 (or, butsumei 物名), i.e. 'names of things'. These poems contain an expression (one word, several words, longer phrases) deliberately hidden in their text. Since poetry is often used while investigating the historical stages of a certain language, it will be attempted to explore the possibilities offered by mono no na and to examine to what extent they can be of service as a source of linguistic information. Two examples will be discussed, taken from the third imperial anthology of Japanese poetry "Shūi waka shū", both by mysterious Fujiwara no Sukemi 藤原輔相 (d. before 956). The first is a rare lexical item, seemingly preserved exclusively in the analysed poem and reappearing only three centuries later. Although its meaning follows directly from the text, its morphological structure is far from clear. The other example is related to the phonetics of the Classical Japanese language, more specifically to the degree to which Chinese borrowings had been assimilated to the native system: it will be examined whether mono no na can be helpful in this respect too.

Paper short abstract:

This paper introduces the construction of revised text and note making of Chinese-Japanese character dictionaries compiled in early Japan. We have provided a detailed report of Kanchi'inbon Ruijumyogisho, which recorded many Japanese readings by katakana written in the Heian period.

Paper long abstract:

This paper introduces the construction of revised text and note making of Chinese-Japanese character dictionaries compiled in early Japan. We have provided a detailed report of Kanchi'inbon Ruijumyogisho, which recorded many Japanese readings by katakana written in the Heian period.

Data management of this study depended on the Integrated database of Hanzi dictionaries in early Japan, also known as HDIC project. The project includes four dictionaries: Kosanjibon Tenreibanshomeigi高山寺本篆隷万象名義, Tenjibon Shinsenjikyo天治本新撰字鏡, Zushoryobon Ruijumyogisho図書寮本類聚名義抄, and Kanchi'inbon Ruijumyogisho観智院本類聚名義抄. Kanchi'inbon Ruijumyogisho contains around 34,000 Japanese readings, which have a high value in research as Japanese linguistics historical documents. Even the largest Japanese dictionary Nihon Kokugo Daijiten (Shogakukan) adopts its many contents as examples. However, being handed down as old manuscripts, owing to the problems of variant characters, cursive, etc., it is difficult to decipher the text, full-text transliteration does not exist.

The research group, to which the authors are affiliated, began the database of the four dictionaries mentioned above in the 1990s and succeeded in publishing the full-text data of Tenreibanshomeigi and Shinsenjikyo. Now, the full-text input of Kanchi'inbon Ruijumyogisho is completed. The issues regarding compiled stylistic rules, terminology, and entry counts have been resolved.

Furthermore, by using the fine, coloured copy of Kanchi'inbon Ruijumyogisho published recently, we are working on improving the precision of the transliterated text. Also, we are making the variant characters' font and reforming the interface of the database, so as to provide highly accurate text to numerous researchers associated with different research domains internationally. Moreover, by incorporating previous research results and the illustrations of Japanese classical literature, we aim to complete the note making of Kanchi'inbon Ruijumyogisho.

Paper short abstract:

The paper aims to conduct a comparative study between the language of Esopo no fabulas and Feiqe monogatari and that of Toraakirabon, analysing all the collocations with koso extracted from the Corpus of Historical Japanese in order to describe the loss of kakari-musubi in Late Middle Japanese.

Paper long abstract:

Kakari-musubi is a Japanese syntactic construction in which the sentence predicate (musubi) related to an emphatic or interrogative particle (kakari particle) is in a form other than the conclusive. It is a salient characteristic of Old and Early Middle Japanese, and disappeared in the course of Late Middle Japanese. All the kakari particles require the predicate in the adnominal form except for the emphatic particle koso, which requires the predicate in the exclamative form. One of the syntactic changes involved in the loss of kakari-musubi is the merger of the conclusive and the adnominal forms. In Christian materials written in spoken language, such as Esopo no fabulas (1593) and Feiqe monogatari (1593), the only kakari-musubi attested is the one with koso, albeit with a great deal of exceptions (Doi 1959; Inoue 1969; Eguchi 1990). The use of koso with an exclamatory predicate at the end of the sixteenth century has been considered the final stage in the loss of kakari-musubi (Frellesvig 2010). However, kakari-musubi with koso is also found in the language of kyōgen dialogues written down by Ōkura Toraakira in 1642, in the eight volumes of the so-called Toraakirabon. This late appearance of the first scripts of kyōgen makes it difficult to provide its language with a precise dating, even though it does reflect many features of the spoken language of late Muromachi and Azuchi Momoyama periods.

The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it aims to conduct a comparative study between the language of Esopo no fabulas and Feiqe monogatari and that of Toraakirabon, analysing all the collocations with koso extracted from the Corpus of Historical Japanese and classifying the predicates in the musubi. Secondly, it aims to compare the language of Christian materials to that of kyōgen, in order to shed light on the importance of the latter in the reconstruction of Late Middle Japanese. The results of the analysis reveal that, whilst sharing several similarities in the morphological shape of predicates in a form other than the exclamatory, the kakari-musibi with koso is more extensively used in kyōgen dialogues than in Christian materials.

Paper short abstract:

João Rodriguez's Arte Breve da Lingoa Iapoa (1620, Macao) is the first example of using 'K' in Japanese romanization. To point out the origin of his methods, I will compare examples of the Japanese romanization in Pater-Noster by Andre Palmeiro to the Chinese romanization by Matteo Ricci.

Paper long abstract:

In this presentation, I will describe the usage of 'K' as [k-] in the romanization of Japanese in late 16th century and early 17th century.

As the letter K comes from the Greek letter Κ, the 'K' notation is mainly used for foreign words in Latin languages including Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian. Therefore, European missionaries in Japan in the 16th century used 'C' or 'Q', not 'K', when they romanized the pronunciation of [k-] of Japanese. João Rodriguez's Arte Breve da Lingoa Iapoa [Nihon shōbunten (The Small Grammar Book of Japanese Language)] (1620, Macao) seems to be the first example of the use of 'K' in the romanization of the Japanese language. Rodriguez's spelling methods are based on Portuguese; therefore, CA, CU, and CO are used, but he suggested using KI and KE instead of QUI and QUE to avoid pronunciation mistakes. He also suggested using KA, KI, KU, KE, and KO as notations of conjugative suffix.

However, in this period, there were few examples of materials that adopted Rodriguez's methods. A rare example using 'K' is the Japanese translation of Pater-Noster in Epistola by Andre Palmeiro (1632, Macao). This Pater-Noster is a multilingual translation of Latin, Japanese, Chinese (Chinese characters and phonetic notation using the alphabet), and Vietnamese. The romanized notations of Japanese translation in Palmeiro's Pater-Noster are partly similar and partly dissimilar from Rodriguez's methods in Arte Breve da Lingoa Iapoa. For example, the notations KI as [ki] and DZU as [dzu] are similar to Rodriguez's methods, but the notation SCI as [ʃi] does not follow Rodriguez's method.

At that time in China, Italian Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci began using the letter 'K' for romanizing Chinese pronunciation, and the notation SCI in Palmeiro's Pater-Noster is quite similar to Ricci's methods. This means that the Japanese romanization in Palmeiro's Pater-Noster uses more than one method: Rodriguez's method and Ricci's method.

I will point out the possibility that the Chinese phonetic notation used by Jesuits in China may have influenced the usage of the letter 'K' in Rodriguez's Arte Breve da Lingoa Iapoa.