kanbun

''Kanbun'' ( ' Han writing') is a system for writing Literary Chinese used in Japan from the Nara period until the 20th century. Much of Japanese literature 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 makes up a large portion of the Japanese lexicon and much classical Chinese literature is accessible to Japanese readers in some resemblance of the original.

History

The Japanese writing system originated through adoption and adaptation of written Chinese. Some of Japan's oldest books (e.g. the ''Nihon Shoki'') and dictionaries (e.g. the '' Tenrei Banshō Meigi'' and '' Wamyō Ruijushō'') were written in ''kanbun''. Other Japanese literary genres have parallels; the '' Kaifūsō'' is the oldest collection of . Burton Watson'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 notes that although Japanese ''kanbun'' conventions have Sino-Xenic parallels with other traditions for reading Literary Chinese like Korean '' hanmun'' and Vietnamese , only ''kanbun'' has survived to 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. Its grammatical relations are identified in subject–verb–object (SVO) order and through the use of particles similar to English prepositions. 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 positions, that is, grammar particles that appear the words and phrases to which they apply.

He lists four major Japanese problems: word order, parsing which Chinese characters should be read together, deciding how to pronounce the characters, and finding suitable equivalents for Chinese function words.

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 Nishogakusha University in Tokyo.

Terminology

The Japanese word ''kanbun'' originally meant 'Literary Chinese writings'—or, the Chinese classics. ''Kanbun'' compositions used two common types of Japanese kanji readings: Sino-Japanese ''on'yomi'' ('pronunciation readings') borrowed from Chinese pronunciations and native Japanese ''kun'yomi'' 'explanation readings' from Japanese equivalents. For example, can be read as adapted from Middle Chinese or as from the indigenous Japanese word meaning 'road'.

''Kanbun'' implemented two particular types of ''kana''. One was ''okurigana'' 'accompanying script', ''kana'' suffixes added to kanji stems to show their Japanese readings; the other was ''furigana'' 'brandishing script', smaller ''kana'' syllables written alongside ''kanji'' to indicate pronunciation. These were used primarily as reinforcements to writing in ''kanbun''. ''Kanbun''—as opposed to , Japanese text with Japanese syntax and predominately ''kun'yomi'' readings—is divided into several types:

;: Chinese text written with Chinese syntax and ''on'yomi'' characters
;: ''Kanbun'' without reading aids or punctuation
;'' Wakan konkō-bun'': Sino-Japanese composition written with Japanese syntax and mixed ''on'yomi'' and ''kun'yomi'' readings
;: Chinese modified with Japanese syntax, a "Japan-ized" version of Literary Chinese

Jean-Noël Robert describes ''kanbun'' as a "perfectly frozen, 'dead language that was continuously used from the late Heian period (794–1185) 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.

As Literary Chinese originally lacked punctuation, the ''kanbun'' tradition developed various conventional reading punctuation, diacritical, and syntactic markers.

;: Guiding marks for rendering Chinese into Japanese
;: The Japanese reading of a kanji
;: A Japanese reading of a Chinese passage
;: Diacritical dots on characters to indicate Japanese grammatical inflections
;: Punctuation marks analogous to commas and full stops
;: Marks placed alongside characters indicating their Japanese ordering is to be read in reverse

''Kaeriten'' grammatically transforms Literary Chinese into Japanese word order. Two are syntactic symbols, the , —linking mark that denotes phrases composed of more than one character, and the denotes 'reverse marks'. The rest are kanji commonly used in numbering and ordering systems:
* Four numerals: 'one', 'two', 'three', and 'four'
* Three locatives: 'top', 'middle', and 'bottom'
* Four Heavenly Stems: 'first', 'second', 'third', and ''hinoto'' 'fourth'
* Three cosmological , see ''Wakan Sansai Zue'': 'heaven', 'earth', and 'person'. For written English, these ''kaeriten'' would correspond with 1, 2, 3; I, II, III; A, B, C, etc.

As an analogy for ''kanbun'' changing the word order from Chinese sentences with subject–verb–object (SVO) into Japanese subject–object–verb (SOV), John DeFrancis gives this example of using a literal English translation—another SVO language—of the opening of the Latin-language '.

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

The illustration to the right exemplifies ''kanbun''. These eight words comprise the well-known first line in the ''Han Feizi'' story (ch. 36) that first coined the term (Japanese , 'contradiction, inconsistency', lit. "spear-shield"), illustrating the irresistible force paradox. Debating with a Confucianist about the legendary Chinese sage rulers Yao and Shun, the Legalist Han Fei argues that one cannot praise them both because that 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 modern Standard Chinese 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 'one who', 'somebody who', which works as nominalizer marking a verb phrase as certain kinds of noun phrases. The original Chinese sentence is marked with five Japanese ''kaeriten'' as:

To interpret this, The 'reverse' mark indicates that the order of the adjacent characters, and , must be reversed:

:
:

The word marked with 'bottom' is shifted after marked by 'top':

:
:

Likewise, the word marked with 'two' is shifted to after marked by 'one':

:
:

To represent this 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 is treated as an additional function word, and the second, the reading of :

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 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'yomi'' 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 reads as a well-formed Japanese sentence with ''kun'yomi'':

This annotated ''kanbun'' translates to, "among Chu people, there existed one who was selling shields and spears".

Complicated example

To illustrate what is possible with ''kaeriten'', here follows a rather complicated example from Crawcour's book, to which he notes: "The student may take some light comfort from the fact that this is as complicated as these markings can get."

is rendered as

Unicode

Kanbun were added to the Unicode Standard in June 1993 with version 1.1. Two Unicode ''kaeriten'' are grammatical symbols () for linking and reverse marks. The others are the organizational kanji for numerals (e.g. ), locatives (e.g. ), Heavenly Stems (e.g. ), and levels (e.g. ).

The Unicode block for kanbun is U+3190..319F:

See also

* ''Gugyeol''
* Idu script
* Interlinear gloss
* Chữ Nôm
* Giải âm
* '' Wakan Konko Bun''

References

Sources

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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