Historical Grammar of Japanese

G. B. Sansom

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136777202
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Ethnische Studien

First published in 1928, this path-breaking work is still of importance and interest to Japanese scholars and linguists.

I

INTRODUCTORY

§1. The Introduction of Writing

NOTHING is known with certainty as to the origins of the Japanese language. It has hitherto usually been considered to belong to the group variously known as Altaic or Finno-Ugrian, chiefly on the ground of structural resemblance to other members of that group. It shows a strong structural likeness to Korean, but very little likeness in vocabulary. Recent investigations tend to disclose certain similarities in structure and vocabulary between Japanese and the Malay-Polynesian languages, but the evidence so far produced is not sufficient to establish any theory claiming a Polynesian origin for the Japanese race or the Japanese language.

The only language to which it is safe to assert that Japanese is closely related is Luchuan. Here the resemblance is so complete that Luchuan can be only a dialect of Japanese, and its vocabulary and syntax therefore provide no indication of the origin of either language. A study of Luchuan is, however, of value in building up hypotheses as to the forms of the archaic language from which the Japanese of the earliest known period and the Luchuan variations thereof are both descended.

Apart from such conjectures, our knowledge of early forms of Japanese is derived from writings of the beginning of the eighth century of our era, which will be presently described. There is no trace of any system of writing in Japan prior to the introduction of Chinese books, which may be put approximately at A. D. 400; and it was not until the sixth century, with the gradual spread of Buddhism, that the study of Chinese became in any sense general. Once the Japanese became acquainted with the Chinese system of writing it was possible, though not by any means easy, for them to make use of that system to represent words in their own language. For reasons of pedantry as well as convenience, as a rule they preferred to neglect their own language and write in Chinese, much as learned men in Europe at one time used Latin; but luckily for philologists they did elect to perpetuate, by using Chinese characters as phonetic symbols, the native form of certain poems, tales, and records which had hitherto been preserved only by oral tradition. It is these texts which furnish us with the materials for the study of archaic Japanese.

For a proper understanding of the extent and accuracy of the information as to early Japanese forms which can be derived from such documents, it is necessary to study in some detail the system of writing developed by the Japanese. Moreover, since the adoption of the Chinese script had a great influence upon both vocabulary and constructions in Japanese, it is important to trace, at least in outline, the growth of that system.

The unit in Chinese writing is a symbol which, through a curious but pardonable confusion of thought, is usually styled an ideograph, but is much more accurately described as a logograph. It is a symbol which represents a word, as contrasted with symbols which, like the letters of an alphabet or a syllabary, represent sounds or combinations of sounds. It is true that the first Chinese characters were pictorial, and that a great number of the later characters have a pictorial element, and to that extent may be said to represent ideas. But in fully nine-tenths of the characters now in use the pictorial element is either secondary or completely lacking, and the phonetic element is predominant. A simple character like

(moon) retains some vestiges of its pictorial quality, and may be said to represent the idea ‘moon’, but nevertheless it stands for the Chinese word for moon (however that word may be pronounced at different points in time and space—e. g. ngwet in about A. D. 500, and yuë in Peking, üt in Canton to-day). When we come to more complex characters, it is clear that their formation not only presupposes the existence of a word, but is governed by the sound of that word. Thus, though

, fang, meaning ‘square’, may at one time have been ideographic,

fang, ‘to ask’, is composed of a phonetic element

fang and a sense element

, ‘to speak’, and does not directly represent the idea of ‘to ask’, but the word fang, which is the Chinese word for ‘to ask’. When they wished to construct a character to represent fang, ‘to ask’, the Chinese took the sign

, which stands for the word fang, ‘square’, and to avoid confusion with this and other words pronounced fang, they added the ‘radical’

, which conveys the idea of speaking.

A Chinese character, as used by the Chinese, is then an ideograph only inasmuch as any written symbol or group of symbols in any language is an ideograph; but it stands for a word, and for one word only. I have insisted upon this point because, as we shall see later, the Japanese method of using the Chinese characters does at times approach an ideographic use.

Before describing more fully the Japanese method, it is as well to state briefly the problem which the first Japanese scholars had before them when they came to consider how to make use of the Chinese script for recording their native words. A simple example will suffice. The character

stands for jen, the Chinese word for ‘man’. The Japanese word for ‘man’ is hito, and a Japanese might agree to let the character

be read by himself and his compatriots as hito, thus establishing

as the conventional sign for hito. But there would still remain the problem of representing the sound of the word hito, and there were reasons which made it often essential to represent the sound rather than the meaning of Japanese words—reasons which may for the moment be summarized by stating that while Chinese was monosyllabic and uninflected Japanese was polysyllabic and highly inflected. To write by means of Chinese characters the sound of a Japanese word, it was necessary to represent separately the elements composing that sound. Now by the fifth century Chinese had become a monosyllabic language, and since each syllable in Chinese was a word, there was a logograph for each syllable, and often of course many logographs for the same syllable. Consequently, when the Japanese wished to write the sound hito, they had in the Chinese symbols a ready means of representing the syllables of which it was composed, and they had no reason to analyse those syllables further into their constituent vowel and consonant sounds. This point has a considerable bearing upon the study of early Japanese forms, but it may for the moment be neglected.

To write, then, the syllable hi of hito, the writer must find a Chinese character standing for some Chinese word of which the pronunciation was the same as, or as near as possible to, the Japanese sound hi. He would find, for instance, the characters

representing Chinese words meaning respectively ‘sort’, ‘not’, ‘grief’, and ‘ice’, but all pronounced hi or something like hi.¹ Similarly with the syllable to. He could use such characters as

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