Old Japanese

A Phonetic Reconstruction

Marc Hideo Miyake

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134403721
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Politics & International Relations
• Sous-sujet: Politics

What did eighth-century Japanese sound like? How does one decode its complex script? This book provides the definitive answers to these questions using an unprecedented range of data from the past and the present.

1
INTRODUCTION

Among the classical languages of the world, Old Japanese (OJ), the literary language of Japan up to the Nara Period (710–794 CE),¹ has fared quite well. While some other classical languages are remembered only among scholars, most Japanese have been exposed to OJ and other varieties of premodern Japanese in secondary school. This situation is quite unlike that of, say, the United States, where no high school students are exposed to Old English except in translation. Untranslated Old English texts are difficult to find at non-academic bookstores, but one can easily find a copy of the OJ poetic anthology Man'yôshû (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves) in ordinary Japanese bookstores. Although OJ is no longer a living language, it is far from forgotten. Even Japanese high school students are familiar with the rudiments of its morphology and lexicon.

Yet the phonetics and phonology of OJ remain unclear. When OJ texts are taught in Japanese classrooms, they are read anachronistically in a modernized pronunciation. Similarly, OJ texts are cited in most Western-language works in a romanization reflecting that anachronistic modernized pronunciation. To demonstrate the gap between this anachronistic modernized pronunciation of OJ and the original pronunciation of OJ, I will cite the first poem in the official history Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters; 712 CE) in two different forms below. On the left is the Hepburn romanization of the poem reflecting its pronunciation in Modern Standard Japanese. On the right is my reconstruction of the approximate pronunciation circa the early eighth century CE.² (An English translation is in Keene (1993: 43).)

(1.1)	yakumo tatsu	*yakumo tatu
	izumo yaegaki	*indumo yapeŋgaki
	tsumagomi ni	*tumaŋgəm∔ ni
	yaegaki tsukuru	*yapeŋgaki tukuru
	sono yaegaki o	*sənə yapeŋgaki wo

This poem is “traditionally considered to be the first Japanese poem ever composed” (Keene 1993: 43). Its composer³ would find its modernized pronunciation quite odd. His *tumaŋgəm∔ would correspond to modern tsumagomi. If sound is an integral part of poetry, then, if one reads OJ poetry as if it were Modern Standard Japanese, much of its essence would be lost. Is OJ merely Modern Standard Japanese with archaic words and grammar?

Yet this anachronistic treatment of OJ pronunciation is partly forgivable because of (1) the lack of a scholarly consensus on OJ phonetics and phonology and (2) a complex script (man'yôgana) that obscures the original pronunciation. By using a modernized pronunciation (and romanizations based upon that modernized pronunciation), one avoids having to choose between the many competing reconstructions of OJ pronunciation based on different analyses of the man'yôgana script and other evidence. As I will demonstrate in Chapter 3, the extant reconstructions of OJ are mutually contradictory and often methodologically troublesome.

This situation is hardly unique to OJ in East Asia. Other classical languages of the region such as Classical Chinese and the premodern Vietnamese of nôm texts⁴ are also traditionally read anachronistically in modernized pronunciations and romanized according to those modernized pronunciations. Once again, there is no consensus about the original pronunciations of these languages. Furthermore, complex scripts (Chinese characters and nôm) obscure the original pronunciations of Classical Chinese and premodern Vietnamese.

However, scholars do agree on the presence of certain abstract phonological distinctions in these languages, even if they do not agree on the concrete phonetic interpretation of these distinctions. In the case of OJ, for example, most scholars agree that there were at least 87 different syllables in the language.⁵

One can view these 87-plus syllables of OJ as algebraic variables: X, Y, Z, etc. If so, then the problem is to find the phonetic values of these 87-plus variables. The goal of this book is to solve this problem by reconstructing OJ phonetics on the basis of an analysis of the man'yôgana orthography of the OJ poetry in the Kojiki (KJK; Records of Ancient Matters; 712 CE) and Nihon shoki (NS or Shoki; Chronicles of Japan; 720 CE).

In Chapter 2, I will describe the earliest written records of Japanese and their orthographies, beginning with the Chinese transcriptions in the Wei zhi (Chronicles of Wei) and leading ultimately to the data at the heart of this book: the OJ poetry in Kojiki and Shoki written in man'yôgana. I will outline the various kinds of man'yôgana found in OJ texts and demonstrate that the poems in Kojiki and Shoki employ two distinct varieties of the ongana (phonogram)⁶ subtype of man'yôgana.

In Chapter 3, I will deal with previous scholarship on ongana, beginning with the eighteenth-century discovery of orthographic distinctions present in ongana but absent in the later kana syllabaries and continuing on to twentieth-century attempts to reconstruct OJ phonology on the basis of ongana. I will present all extant reconstructions of OJ phonology known to me for comparison and criticism.

In Chapter 4, I will sketch what is known about the phonology of the ancestors of Old Japanese from internal and external reconstruction. I will also sketch the phonological history of Japanese after the eighth century. I intend my reconstruction of OJ based on written records to be as consistent as possible with (1) the results of internal and external reconstructions of pre-Nara-Period Japanese and (2) later developments in the phonological history of Japanese.

In Chapter 5, I will discuss the reconstruction of Late Old Chinese, Early Middle Chinese, and Late Middle Chinese — the three stages of the Chinese language relevant to the interpretation of ongana. This discussion will necessitate an excursion into Sinoxenic — the large strata of borrowings from Chinese in Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese (i.e., Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean, and Sino-Vietnamese). I will show that Sino-Korean, Sino-Vietnamese, and the Sino-Vietnamese-based phonograms of the premodern Vietnamese nôm writing system are important sources of data not only for Chinese reconstruction but also for the interpretation of the ongana.

In Chapter 6, I will formulate my methodology for the reconstruction of eighth-century Japanese and the goals which my reconstruction must fulfill.

In Chapters 7 and 8, I will reconstruct the phonetic values of the consonants and vowels of the Central dialect of OJ primarily on the basis of Chinese and Sinoxenic evidence with reference to the textual frequency and distribution of ongana and what is known about earlier and later Japanese phonology. I will then reconstruct a typologically sound phonemic system for OJ on the basis of my reconstructed phonetic values.

Finally, in Chapter 9, I will summarize my findings, speculate on the implications of my Central OJ reconstruction for the reconstruction of the Nara Period pronunciation of Sino-Japanese, and indicate future directions of research.

Notes

1 The association of stages of the Japanese language with Japanese historical periods is merely convenient and not particularly accurate, especially in the case of OJ. I do not intend to imply that linguistic changes coincided with the shift of the capital to Nara in 710 CE and later to Heian (modern Kyoto) in 794 CE. Although OJ texts were compiled during the Nara Period, some or most of their content may date before the Nara Period. I cite only the periods most commonly associated with each stage in order to give a crude idea of chronology to readers unfamiliar with Japanese language history. A term such as ‘Old Japanese’ by itself tells lay readers nothing about when Old Japanese existed.

2 I will present my arguments for the reconstructions of individual OJ consonants and vowels in Chapters 7 and 8. My reconstructed pronunciation is “circa the eighth century CE” because, although Kojiki itself was completed by 712, its contents do not necessarily reflect OJ as spoken in 712. The poetry of Kojiki may “antedate the introduction of writing” into Japan several centuries earlier (Keene 1993: 33). Furthermore, as I will argue in Chapter 2, the orthography may reflect a tr...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations, symbols, and conventions
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Early transcriptions of Japanese
• 3 Previous research on phonograms
• 4 Japanese phonology through time
• 5 Old Chinese, Middle Chinese, and Sinoxenic
• 6 Goals and methodology
• 7 The reconstruction of Old Japanese consonants
• 8 The reconstruction of Old Japanese vowels
• 9 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index