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Wakan Konkō-bun
is a Japanese writing style which uses a mix of Japanese and Chinese writing styles that intermingles Japanese and Chinese character readings, grammar, and lexical styles. It came from the practice of using marks, added to Chinese characters, to indicate the order in which to read them for Japanese speakers. was often written in Hiragana and derived from Japanese reading conventions for classical Chinese. shows that the development of written Japanese is inseparable from the use of literary Chinese. It can be considered a transition style between pure ''kanbun'' and modern Japanese. Works using Wakan Konkō Bun Many classical works use Wakan Konkō Bun. Many of these originated in the Heian period or after. is one of them. ''Collection of Tales from a Time now Past'' is a collection of 1039 Setsuwa compiled in the early 12th century during the Heian Period. These stories are not presented as though they were being spoken by a narrator, but rather as transmissions of stories th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Konjaku Monogatarishu
''Amorphophallus konjac'', also known as konnyaku, and konjac, is a species of flowering plant in the family ''Araceae''. It is native to Yunnan in southwestern China, and has an edible corm. It is sometimes referred to as devil's tongue, voodoo lily, snake palm, or elephant yam. It is a relative of the titan arum (''A. titanum''), one of the largest flowering plants in the world and a congener of konjac. Konjac is cultivated in warm subtropical to tropical areas of East and Southeast Asia, from China and Japan south to Indonesia and Vietnam (USDA hardiness zone 6–11). It is a perennial plant, growing from a large corm up to 25 cm (10 in) in diameter. The single leaf is up to 1.3 m (4 ft) across, bipinnate, and divided into numerous leaflets. The flowers are produced on a spathe enclosed by a dark purple spadix up to 55 cm (22 in) long. The food made from the corm is known in English by its Japanese name, ''konnyaku''. Two basic types of cake, w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Japanese Script
The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana. Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis. Almost all written Japanese sentences contain a mixture of kanji and kana. Because of this mixture of scripts, in addition to a large inventory of kanji characters, the Japanese writing system is considered to be one of the most complicated currently in use. Several thousand kanji characters are in regular use, which mostly originate from traditional Chinese characters. Others made in Japan are referred to as "Japanese kanji" (), also known as " urcountry's kanji" (). Each character has an intrinsic meaning (or range of meanings), and most have more than one pronunciation, the choic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Writing
Written Chinese is a writing system that uses Chinese characters and other symbols to represent the Chinese languages. Chinese characters do not directly represent pronunciation, unlike letters in an alphabet or syllabograms in a syllabary. Rather, the writing system is ''morphosyllabic'': characters are one spoken syllable in length, but generally correspond to morphemes in the language, which may either be independent words, or part of a polysyllabic word. Most characters are constructed from smaller components that may reflect the character's meaning or pronunciation. Literacy requires the memorization of thousands of characters; college-educated Chinese speakers know approximately 4,000. This has led in part to the adoption of complementary transliteration systems (generally Pinyin) as a means of representing the pronunciation of Chinese. Chinese writing is first attested during the late Shang dynasty (), but the process of creating characters is thought to have begun centurie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kanbun
''Kanbun'' ( 'Han Chinese, 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 language, 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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hiragana
is a Japanese language, Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with ''katakana'' as well as ''kanji''. It is a phonetic lettering system. The word ''hiragana'' means "common" or "plain" kana (originally also "easy", as contrasted with kanji). Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems. With few exceptions, each mora (linguistics), mora in the Japanese language is represented by one character (or one digraph) in each system. This may be a vowel such as /a/ (hiragana wikt:あ, あ); a consonant followed by a vowel such as /ka/ (wikt:か, か); or /N/ (wikt:ん, ん), a nasal stop, nasal sonorant which, depending on the context and dialect, sounds either like English ''m'', ''n'' or ''ng'' () when syllable-final or like the nasal vowels of French language, French, Portuguese language, Portuguese or Polish language, Polish. Because the characters of the kana do not represent single consonants (except in the case of the aforementioned ん), the kana are r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Literary 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 Chinese, which was used for almost all formal writing in China until the early 20th century. Each written character corresponds to a single spoken syllable, and almost always to a single independent word. As a result, the characteristic style of the language is comparatively terse. Starting in the 2nd century CE, use of Literary Chinese spread to the countries surrounding China, including Vietnam, Korea, Japan, and the Ryukyu Islands, where it represented the only known form of writing. Literary Chinese was adopted as the language of civil administration in these countries, creating what is known as the Sinosphere. Each additionally developed systems of readings and annotations that enabled non-Chinese speakers to interpret Literary ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 period in Japanese history when the Chinese influence on Japanese culture, Chinese influences were in decline and the national culture matured. The Heian period is also considered the peak of the Japanese Emperors of Japan, imperial court, noted for its Japanese art, art, especially Japanese poetry, poetry and Japanese literature, literature. Two syllabaries unique to Japan, katakana and hiragana, emerged during this time. This gave rise to Japan's famous vernacular literature, with many of its texts written by court ladies who were not as educated in Chinese as their male counterparts. Although the Imperial House of Japan had power on the surface, the real power was in the hands of the Fujiwara clan, a powerful Kuge, aristocratic family wh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Konjaku Monogatarishū
, also known as the , is a Japanese collection of over one thousand tales written during the late Heian period (794–1185). The entire collection was originally contained in 31 volumes, of which 28 remain today. The volumes cover various tales from India, China and Japan. Detailed evidence of lost ''monogatari'' exist in the form of literary critique, which can be studied to reconstruct the objects of their critique to some extent. Title Each tale in the ''Konjaku Monogatarishū'' starts with the phrase (lit. now long ago), which in its Japanese reading is pronounced ''ima wa mukashi''. The Sino-Japanese reading of this phrase is ''konjaku'', and it is from the Chinese-style reading that the collection is named. The ''Konjaku Monogatarishū'' is commonly known by the shorter name "''Konjaku Monogatari''". Since it is an anthology rather than a single tale, however, the longer title is more accurate. Structure The ''Konjaku Monogatarishū'' is divided according to the region of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Setsuwa
''Setsuwa'' () is a Japanese literary genre. It consists of myths, legends, folktales, and anecdotes. Among the , those that are full-length are generally referred to as . In Japan, the term is also applied to similar works around the world. ''Setsuwa'' means "spoken story". As one of the vaguest forms of literature, ''setsuwa'' is believed to have been passed down or presented in the form of narrations. ''Setsuwa'' are based foremost on oral tradition and existed primarily as folktales or in other non-written forms before being recorded and committed to text. However, some writers question whether all ''setsuwa'' tales were originally oral tradition, or only mostly so. Although there are no formal rules regarding what constitutes ''setsuwa'' as a genre, stories in the ''setsuwa'' style "have in common brevity; an uncomplicated plot unfolded in plain, direct language; character delineation through dialogue and action rather than through description and psychological analysis; and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Tale Of The Heike
is an epic account compiled prior to 1330 of the struggle between the Taira clan and Minamoto clan for control of Japan at the end of the 12th century in the Genpei War (1180–1185). It has been translated into English at least five times. The first translation was by Arthur Lindsay Sadler, in 1918–1921. A complete translation in nearly 800 pages by Hiroshi Kitagawa & Bruce T. Tsuchida was published in 1975. It was also translated by Helen McCullough in 1988. An abridged translation by Burton Watson was published in 2006. In 2012, Royall Tyler completed his translation, which, he says, seeks to be mindful of the performance style for which the work was originally intended. Historical novelist Eiji Yoshikawa published a prose rendering in the '' Asahi Weekly'' in 1950, under the title ' (''Shin Heike Monogatari''). Background Title Heike () refers to the Taira (), ''hei'' being the ''on'yomi'' reading of the first ''kanji'' and "ke" () meaning "family". However, in t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wakan Rōeishū
The is an anthology of Chinese poems (Jp. ''kanshi ''漢詩) and 31-syllable Japanese waka (Jp. ''tanka'' 短歌) for singing to fixed melodies (the melodies are now extinct). The text was compiled by Fujiwara no Kintō ca. 1013. It contains 588 Chinese poems by some 30 Chinese poets, including Bai Juyi (Po Chü-i; 772－846), Yuan Zhen (Yüan Shen; 779－831) and Xu Hun (Hsü Hun; fl ca 850) together with some 50 Japanese poets of Chinese verse such as Sugawara no Michizane, Minamoto no Shitagau (911－983), Ōe no Asatsuna (886－957), Ki no Haseo (845－912), and others. The 216 waka poems in the collection are by 80 famous poets such as Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, Ki no Tsurayuki, Ōshikōchi Mitsune, among many other illustrious names. ''Wakan rōeishū'' is divided into two books: "Seasonal poems" occupy the first book, while "Miscellanea" are in the second. The poems are further sub-classified by common topics (Jp. ''dai'' 題); ''kanshi'' alternate with ''waka'' on the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Minamoto Clan
was a Aristocracy (class), noble surname bestowed by the Emperors of Japan upon members of the Imperial House of Japan, imperial family who were excluded from the List of emperors of Japan, line of succession and demoted into the ranks of Nobility, the nobility since 814."...the Minamoto (1192-1333)". ''Warrior Rule in Japan'', page 11. Cambridge University Press. Several noble lines were bestowed the surname, the most notable of which was the Seiwa Genji, whose descendants established the Kamakura shogunate, Kamakura and Ashikaga shogunate, Ashikaga Shogun, shogunates following the Heian era. The Minamoto was one of the four great Japanese clans, clans that dominated Japanese politics during the Heian period, Heian period in History of Japan, Japanese history—the other three were the Fujiwara clan, Fujiwara, the Taira clan, Taira, and the Tachibana clan (kuge), Tachibana. In the late Heian period, Minamoto rivalry with the Taira culminated in the Genpei War (1180–1185 AD). T ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
