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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