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Paper short abstract

This study analyzes the language of 9th-century Japanese glossed Buddhist texts to show how translators presented complex narratives and compelling dialogue using vernacular Japanese temporal morphemes (e.g., -ki, -tu, & -tari), nominalizations (e.g., -aku), and sentence-final expressions (-keri).

Paper long abstract

The earliest examples of complex narratives in Japanese are found in 9th-century CE translations of Literary Sinitic Buddhist texts rendered via gloss. The linguistic variety of Late Old Japanese found in these narratives arose from transposing and reciting Literary Sinitic texts in Japanese and is as old as the act of reading itself in Japan. Although most of these sutras originated in India, they arrived in Japan already translated into Literary Sinitic. To render these texts in Japanese, translators had to add tense, aspect, modality, honorifics, nominalizations, and other markers to predicates and case particles to nouns. Furthermore, to preserve their translations in writing they used diacritic markings between, and occasionally on, the source texts’ sinographs to denote the appropriate Japanese phonology and morphosyntax. This paper examines morphological marking in these Japanese renditions of Buddhist texts to explain how tense and aspect markers, such as -ki, -tu, -nu, -tari, and -(a)ri, create narrative frames in discourse and how nominalizations and other sentence-final expressions, such as -aku, -mono zo, and -keri, are added to create natural dialogue in Japanese. By examining the frequency of the above temporal markers in relation to narrative structure and the emotional states of characters using the above expressions in dialogue, it uses qualitative and quantitative linguistic analyses to show how practitioners engaged in sutra translation in early Heian Japan employed vernacular narrative techniques with maximum rhetorical force to best present these texts to a domestic audience.

Keywords: Late Old Japanese, Kundokubun, Translation, Narrative Structure, Emotion

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Paper short abstract

This paper introduces a corpus based on two Waka-kanbun sources, the Kōzanjibon Koōrai and the Owari no kuni Gebumi. Kunten annotations enable reliable corpus construction as Japanese text. The corpus is encoded in XML with morphological annotation and will be released as “CHJ Wakan Konkōbun”.

Paper long abstract

This presentation reports on the construction and publication of a corpus of kundoku texts based on two historical sources: the Kōzanjibon Koōrai and the Owari no kuni Gebumi. Both are written in Waka-kanbun (Japanized classical Chinese) and are valuable for research on the history of Japanese written styles. However, relatively few Waka-kanbun materials in existing corpora are organized in a form that is readily usable for sustained philological and linguistic analysis.

To address this gap, our project is building a corpus for the Insei period (c. 11th-12th centuries) annotated version of the Kōzanjibon Koōrai and the CE 1325 annotated version of the Owari no kuni Gebumi. Although the base texts themselves are in Waka-kanbun, they preserve rich reading information through kunten marks from the Insei and Kamakura periods (c. 12th-14th centuries), respectively. This makes it possible to establish readings for most passages and to construct them into a Japanese corpus.

The Kōzanjibon Koōrai, preserved in Kōzanji Temple’s repository, is a collection of model letters reflecting the lives of aristocrats and officials in the late Heian period (c. 10th-12th centuries). The manuscript includes katakana kunten added in a consistent hand by an unknown compiler. The Owari no kuni Gebumi is a legal petition issued in CE 988. While the original document no longer survives, this corpus adopts the Shinfukuji Hōshōin manuscript as the base resource and uses its kundoku reading as the corpus text.

The corpus encodes these readings as structured XML, explicitly tagging kunten-related information and scholars’ supplied readings or emendations. In cases of ambiguous readings and orthographic variation, decisions are made based on previous scholarship, while applying normalization necessary for corpus use. We also add morphological annotation following the standards of the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics’ Corpus of Historical Japanese (CHJ), with automatic analyses manually reviewed and corrected. We plan to release it as the sub-corpus “CHJ Wakan Konkōbun”, enabling searches that combine morphology with metadata. We expect this corpus to support comparison with related CHJ materials and to contribute to future research in the history of the Japanese language.

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Paper short abstract

I propose a corpus-linguistic framework grounded in historical grammatical theories to analyze translation choices in my corpus of Rangaku documents. I argue that integrating Early Modern Japanese theories reveals patterns which would otherwise be overlooked by modern linguistic frameworks.

Paper long abstract

The present paper highlights the methodological value of integrating historical theories within modern corpus linguistics, by analyzing Japanese translations from Dutch.

During the Edo period, Japanese scholars were exposed to European languages and compelled to investigate the very nature of translation and to develop new theories and methodologies for the Japanese rendition of terms and concepts previously unknown. They soon realized that translation could not simply consist of a one-to-one substitution of lexical elements. Instead, they increasingly shifted their attention toward word inflection and how meaning emerges from morphosyntactic interactions within sentences.

Since the pioneering research conducted by Shizuki Tadao (Nakano Ryūho, 1760 – 1806), Japanese scholars began systematically analyzing Dutch grammar and developing theories capable of describing previously under-researched morphosyntactic phenomena. The approach to a new foreign linguistic system inevitably led these scholars to examine the grammatical structure of their own native tongue. Handbooks of Dutch grammar produced during this period, which were often also conceived of as translation guides, constitute invaluable sources for understanding how early modern Japanese scholars interpreted grammatical patterns and how they attributed nuances in meaning to them.

Based on these premises, this paper proposes to approach corpus linguistics assuming that historical grammatical theories are indispensable for the examination of the grammatical choices made by the translators within historical corpora. Accordingly, the paper first outlines key principles governing the translation of Dutch grammar into Japanese, as articulated by scholars active in the latter half of the Edo period. It then demonstrates how incorporating these historical theories into corpus analysis enables the identification of grammatical patterns that remain unseen when conducting research solely through the lens of modern grammatical theory. This approach offers productive insights into the long-standing debate surrounding the origin of Japanese passive constructions (Martin 1975; Earns 1993; Kinsui 1997) and their correspondence to traditional European theories on the passive voice. Preliminary research on the data on passivity from my corpus suggests a low degree of correspondence between traditionally defined passive constructions across these translations fro, Dutch. Instead, different patterns emerge thanks to the indications provided by language-related materials of the time.

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Paper short abstract

The Roman Jesuit Archives hold 17th-century manuscripts written in Macau, containing Chinese characters with translations in Latin, Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese. Focusing on Japanese kanji readings therein, I will examine the Japanese kanji studies by Jesuits after being expelled from Japan.

Paper long abstract

This presentation examines the study of Japanese kanji by Jesuits in 17th-century Macau.

The earliest European analyses of kanji pronunciation date back to Christian documents (Kirishitan Shiryō) compiled between the late 16th and early 17th centuries. While sources such as "Vocabulário da Língua do Japão" (Nagasaki, 1603–04), "Arte da Lingoa de Iapam" (Nagasaki, 1604–08), and "Arte Breue da Lingoa Iapoa" (Macau, 1620) are well-known, little-known　manuscripts related to the Japanese language produced in Macau also exist.

The Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (ARSI) houses manuscripts containing Chinese characters with translations or transcriptions in Latin, Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese. One of these manuscripts includes Japanese kanji pronunciations (e.g., 的 nô, 爾 vô) that appear irregular compared to standard readings. While some of these irregular pronunciations closely resemble the Tō-on (Early Modern Sino-Japanese reading) of the Edo period, others cannot be explained by this alone. Some may be simple errors, while certain cases appear to reflect the influence of kundoku—the traditional Japanese method of reading Chinese texts. The pronunciations influenced by kundoku appear curious when considered as readings of the kanji alone.

The Japanese language recorded in these manuscripts written in Macau serves as a valuable resource for understanding how Europeans studied the Japanese language outside of Japan. These findings are expected to contribute significantly to the fields of historical Japanese linguistics and Jesuit linguistic studies.