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

Kanbun in its most literal definition means "Chinese writing". The Japanese writing system originated through adoption and adaptation of written Chinese (kanbun). 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.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

Kanbun is described by Jean-Noël Robert as a "perfectly frozen 'deadTemplate:'" language that was continuously used from the late Heian period (794–1185) until after World War II. Kanbun, otherwise known as Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese, had long since ceased to be a colloquial language in China. Yet all the oldest writing in Japan are in kanbun and predate any written documents in Japanese, although there is considerable debate if these Chinese texts contained traces of the Japanese vernacular. Taking into consideration all the texts written in both Japanese and Chinese, including monastic documents, as well as 'near-Chinese' (hentai-kanbun) texts, the amount of Chinese writing in Japan may exceed what was written in Japanese. Despite the size, quality, and importance of kanbun writing, John Timothy Wixted notes that scholars have disregarded kanbun as an area of study until recent times and it is the least properly represented part of the Japanese canon.

Aside from Chinese writing, kanbun also refers to a genre of techniques for reading Chinese texts read like Japanese or for writing in a way similar to Chinese. 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.

In the Japanese kanbun reading tradition, the Chinese text is transformed through punctuation, analysis, and translation into classical Japanese. Through a limited canon of Japanese forms and syntactic structures treated as though they existed in alignment with vocabulary and structures of Classical Chinese, the kanbun text could be read in drastically different ways. At its most extreme, this type of reading could render the text so simplified that it could be understood through an elementary student's perspective. At its best, it could preserve a large body of Classical Chinese texts that would have otherwise been lost. Thus the kanbun could also be of great value for understanding early Chinese literature.

There were several linguistic hurdles involved in kanbun transformation. Chinese grammatical order is subject–verb–object (SVO) and uses particles similar to English prepositions whereas morphemes are typically one syllable in length and inflection plays no role in the grammar. Conversely, Japanese sentence order uses SOV with syntactic features, including Template:Em positions such as grammar particles that appear Template:Em the words and phrases to which they apply.

Four major problems faced when transforming kanbun are the word order, parsing which Chinese characters should be read together, deciding how to pronounce the characters, and finding suitable equivalents for Chinese function words.

A new development in kanbun studies is the Web-accessible database being developed by scholars at Nishogakusha University in Tokyo.Template:Sfn

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

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,Template:Sfn and An Introduction to Japanese Kanbun by Komai and Rohlich, reviewed by Andrew Markus in 1990Template:Sfn and WixtedTemplate:Explain in 1998.

Example

Template:Dark mode invert 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 Template:Gloss marked with 'bottom' is shifted after marked by 'top':

Likewise, the word Template:Gloss 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:

Kanbun[1] Official Unicode Consortium code chart (PDF)

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

A

B

C

D

E

F

U+319x

㆐

㆑

㆒

㆓

㆔

㆕

㆖

㆗

㆘

㆙

㆚

㆛

㆜

㆝

㆞

㆟

Notes 1.^ Template:Unicode version

See also

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

External links

• Kanbun in Unicode
• Kanbun – Test for Unicode support in Web browsers, Alan Wood
• International Research Project Based on Kanbun Sources to Reconstruct a View of Japanese Culture, Nishōgakusha University