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For the 17th-century Japanese era name, see Kanbun (era). was a after Manji and before Enpō. This period spanned the years from 1661 to 1673.

The Japanese word kanbun or kambun (漢文? "Han/Chinese writing") originally meant "Classical Chinese writings, Chinese classic texts, Classical Chinese literature" and was adapted to mean "a Japanese method of reading annotated Classical Chinese in translation; writing with literary Chinese for Japanese readers; Japanese literature composed in Sino-Japanese". Han Chinese ( are an Ethnic group native to China and by most modern definitions the largest single Ethnic group in the world. Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese is a traditional style of Written Chinese based on the Grammar and Vocabulary of ancient Chinese Chinese classic texts or Chinese canonical texts ( refer to the pre- Qin Chinese texts especially the Confucian Four Books and Five Classics Chinese literature extends back thousands of years from the earliest recorded dynastic court Archives to the mature fictional Novel that arose during the Ming Dynasty Japanese literature spans a period of almost two millennia Early works were heavily influenced by cultural contact with China and Chinese literature, often written Sino-Japanese or Kango (ja [[wikt漢語 漢語]] in Japanese, refers to that portion of the Japanese vocabulary that originated in the (Kanbun also abbreviates kanbungaku 漢文学 "Classical Chinese Literature", a required subject in high school. ) In a rough English analogy, kanbun is like English speakers reading e.g. as "for example" instead of "exempli gratia". C D E

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History

The Japanese writing system originated through adoption and adaptation of Written Chinese. The modern Japanese writing system uses three main scripts Kanji, characters of Chinese origin, Hiragana Written Chinese comprises the written symbols used to represent Spoken Chinese and the rules about how they are arranged and punctuated Japan's oldest books (e. g. , Kojiki and Nihon Shoki) and dictionaries (e. The, sometimes translated as The Chronicles of Japan, is the second oldest book of classical Japanese history. g. , Tenrei Banshō Meigi and Wamyō Ruijushō) were written in kanji and kanbun. The is the oldest extant Japanese dictionary of Chinese characters. The is a 938 CE Japanese dictionary of Chinese characters. The Heian Period scholar Minamoto no Shitagō (源順 911-983 CE began compilation in 934 Other Japanese literary genres have parallels; the Kaifūsō is the oldest collection of Kanshi (漢詩 "Han/Chinese poetry") "Chinese poetry composed by Japanese poets". is the oldest collection of Chinese poetry ( kanshi) written by Japanese poets refers to Chinese-language poetry written in Japan by Japanese poets Burton Watson's (1975, 1976) English translations of kanbun compositions provide a good introduction to this literary field. Burton Watson (born 1925 is an accomplished translator of Chinese and Japanese literature and poetry

Roy Andrew Miller notes that although Japanese kanbun conventions have Sinoxenic parallels with other traditions for reading Classical Chinese like Korean hanmun 한문 (漢文) and Vietnamese chữ nho (字儒), only kanbun has survived into the present day. Sinoxenic languages are languages other than Sinitic languages which have at one point adopted written Chinese characters, or sinographs which have greatly affected This article is mainly about the spoken Korean language See Hangul for details on the native Korean writing system Hanja is the Korean name for Chinese characters. More specifically it refers to those Chinese characters borrowed from Chinese and incorporated Vietnamese ( tiếng Việt, or less commonly Việt ngữ) formerly known under French colonization as Annamese ( see Annam) Hán tự ( {{IPA|/han˦˥ tɯ˨/}}; 漢[[wikt 字|字]] meaning " Chinese character " or chữ Nho ( {{IPA|/tɕɯ˧˨˧ ɲɔ/}} 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. (1967:31)

William C. Hannas points out the linguistic hurdles involved in kanbun transformation.

Kambun, 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 postpositions, that is, grammar particles that appear after the words and phrases to which they apply. (1997:32)

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. In Linguistics, word order typology refers to the study of the different ways in which languages arrange the constituents of their sentences relative to each other and the systematic

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. (1998:23)

A promising new development in kanbun studies is the Web-accessible database being developed by scholars at Nishōgakusha University in Tokyo (see Kamichi and Machi 2006).

Conventions and terminology

Compositions written in kanbun used two common types of Japanese kanji (漢字 "Chinese characters") readings: Sino-Japanese on'yomi (音読み "pronunciation readings") borrowed from Chinese pronunciations and native Japanese kun'yomi (訓読み "explanation readings") from Japanese equivalents. are the Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese logographic writing system along with Hiragana (ひらがな 平仮名 Katakana A Chinese character, also known as a Han character ( is a Logogram used in writing Chinese (hanzi Japanese ( For example, 道 can be read as dō adapted from Chinese dào (道 "way, path") or as michi from the indigenous Japanese word meaning "road, street". Tao ( 道, Pinyin Dào) is a metaphysical concept found in Taoism, Confucianism, and more generally in ancient Chinese philosophy

Kanbun implemented two particular types of kana: okurigana (送り仮名 "accompanying script") "kana suffixes added to kanji stems to show their Japanese readings" and furigana (振り仮名 "brandishing script") "smaller kana syllables printed/written alongside kanji to indicate pronunciation". are Kana suffixes following Kanji stems in Japanese written words is a Japanese reading aid consisting of smaller Kana printed next to a Kanji or other character to indicate its Pronunciation.

Kanbun – as opposed to Wabun (和文 "Wa (Japan) writing") meaning "Japanese text, composition written with Japanese syntax and predominately kun'yomi readings" – is subdivided into several types. Japanese, is the oldest recorded name of Japan. Chinese Korean and Japanese scribes regularly wrote Wa or Yamato "Japan" with the

Jean-Noël Robert describes kanbun as a "perfectly frozen, 'dead,' language" that was continuously used from the late Heian Period until after World War II. According to some definitions an extinct language is a Language which no longer has any speakers, whereas a dead language is a language which is no longer spoken The is the last division of classical Japanese history, running from 794 to 1185.

Classical Chinese, which, as we have seen, had long since ceased to be a spoken language on the mainland (if indeed it had ever had 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. (2006:32)

Inasmuch as Classical Chinese was originally unpunctuated, the kanbun tradition developed various conventional reading punctuation, diacritical, and syntactic markers.

Kaeriten grammatically transform Classical Chinese into Japanese word order. Two are syntactic symbols, the | tatesen (縦線 "vertical bar") "linking mark" denotes phrases and the レ reten (レ点 "[katakana] re mark") denotes "return/reverse marks". The rest are kanji commonly used in numbering and ordering systems: 4 numerals ichi 一 "one", ni 二 "two", san 三 "three", and yon 四 "four"; 3 locatives ue 上 "top" , naka 中 "middle", and shita 下 "bottom"; 4 Heavenly Stems kinoe 甲 "first", kinoto 乙 "second", hinoe 丙 "third", and hinoto 丁 "fourth"; and the 3 cosmological sansai (三才 "three worlds", see Wakan Sansai Zue) ten 天 "heaven", chi 地 "earth", and jin 人 "person". The ten Celestial Stems ( sometimes known as Heavenly Stems, are the elements of an ancient Chinese cyclic character Numeral system: Jia (甲 Yi (乙 is a Japanese Encyclopedia published in 1713 in the Edo period. For written English, these kaeriten would correspond with 1, 2, 3; I, II, III; A, B, C, etc.

As an analogy for how kanbun numerically marks Chinese sentences with Subject Verb Object (SVO) word order into Japanese Subject Object Verb (SOV), John DeFrancis (1989:132) gives this English (another SVO language) literal translation of the Latin (another SOV) Commentarii de Bello Gallico opening. In Linguistic typology, subject-verb-object ( SVO) is a sentence structure where the subject comes first the Verb second and the object In Linguistic typology, Subject Object Verb (SOV is the type of languages in which the subject, object, and Verb of a sentence appear or usually John DeFrancis (born 1911 is a Chinese language professor emeritus and researcher at the University of Hawaii who wrote a number of Chinese instructional texts (his Commentarii de Bello Gallico is Julius Caesar 's third-person account of his nine years of war in Gaul.

Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres
2 3 1 4 5 7 6
Gaul is all divided into parts three

Two English textbooks for students of kanbun are by Crawcour (1965, reviewed by Ury 1990) and Komai and Rohlich (1988, reviewed by Markus 1990 and Wixted 1998).

Unicode kanbun

The Unihan subset of the Unicode Standard includes 16 kanbun annotation superscript marks. In Computing, Unicode is an Industry standard allowing Computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's Alan Wood (linked below) says: "The Japanese word kanbun refers to classical Chinese writing as used in Japan. The characters in this range are used to indicate the order in which words should be read in these Chinese texts. "

Two Unicode kaeriten are grammatical symbols (㆐㆑) for "linking marks" and "reverse marks". The others are organizational kanji for: numbers (㆒㆓㆔㆕) "1, 2, 3, 4"; locatives (㆖㆗㆘) "top, middle, bottom"; Heavenly Stems (㆙㆚㆛㆜) "1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th"; and levels (㆝㆞㆟) "heaven", earth, person".

Kaeriten Example from Hanfeizi
Kaeriten Example from Hanfeizi

Example

The illustration to the right exemplifies kanbun. These eight characters are the well-known first line in the Han Feizi story (chap. The Han Feizi is a work written by Han Feizi at the end of the Warring States Period in China, detailing his political philosophy. 36, 難一 "Collection of Difficulties, No. 1") that first recorded the word máodùn (Japanese mujun, 矛盾 "contradiction, inconsistency", lit. "spear-shield"), illustrating the irresistible force paradox. The Irresistible force paradox, also the unstoppable force paradox, is a Classic Paradox formulated as follows What happens when an In debating with a Confucianist about the legendary Chinese sage rulers Yao and Shun, Legalist Master Han Fei argues that you cannot praise them both because you would be making a "spear-shield" contradiction. Confucianism ( is a Chinese ethical and philosophical system originally developed from the teachings of the fifth century B Yao ( Traditional Chinese: 堯, Simplified Chinese: 尧) (2358 - 2258 BC was a legendary Chinese ruler one of the Three Sovereigns Shun ( was a legendary 23rd -22nd century BC leader of ancient China, among the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors, whose half-century of rule was one of In Chinese history, Legalism ( was one of the four main philosophic schools during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period (the other The context, in a word-for-word English translation, reads:

A-man from-Ch'u was-selling spears, shields. Praising them, he-said: My shields are so-hard-that [of all] things none can defeat-them. Again, praising his spears, he-said: My spears are so-sharp-that [of all] things none can defeat-them. Someone said: What if with your spear [I were to] defeat your shield? That man was not able-to respond. " (tr. Wu 1997:111)

Since Chinese and English both have Subject-Verb-Object grammatical order, literally translating this first sentence is straightforwardly understandable, excepting the final particle zhě 者 "one who; that which", which is a nominalizer that marks a pause after a noun phrase. In Linguistics, nominalization refers to the use of a Verb or an Adjective as a Noun, with or without morphological transformation In grammatical theory, a noun phrase (abbreviated NP) is a Phrase whose head is a Noun or a Pronoun, optionally accompanied

楚 人 有 鬻 盾 與 矛 者
Chǔ rén yǒu yù dùn yǔ máo zhě
Chu man was selling shields and spears (nominalizer)

The original Chinese sentence is marked with five Japanese kaeriten as:

楚人有下鬻二盾與一レ矛者上

To interpret this, the character 有 "was" marked with shita 下 "bottom" is shifted to the location marked by ue 上 "top", and likewise the character 鬻 "sell" marked with ni 二 "two" is shifted to the location marked by ichi 一 "one". The re レ "reverse mark" indicates that the order of the adjacent characters must be reversed. Or, to represent this kanbun reading in numerical terms:

楚 人 有 鬻 盾 與 矛 者
1 2 8 6 3 5 4 7

Following these kanbun instructions step by step transforms the sentence into Japanese Subject-Object-Verb grammatical order. The Sino-Japanese on'yomi readings and meanings are:

楚 人 盾 矛 與 鬻 者 有
So jin jun mu yo juku sha yū
Chu man shields spears and sell (nominalizer) was

Next, Japanese function words and conjugations can be added with okurigana, and Japanese to と "and" can be substituted for Chinese 與 "and":

楚人に盾と矛とを鬻ぐ者有り

Lastly, kun'yomi readings for characters can be annotated with furigana. This practice, which is commonly provided in texts intended for Japanese children and students, would be unnecessary for educated native speakers. This sentence's only uncommon kanji is hisa(gu) 鬻ぐ "sell, deal in", a literary character which neither Kyōiku kanji nor Jōyō kanji includes. also known as is a list of 1006 Kanji and associated readings developed and maintained by the Japanese Ministry of Education that prescribes which kanji and which readings The is the Kanji characters as a guide announced officially by the Japanese Ministry of Education.

楚(そ)人(ひと)に盾(たて)と矛(ほこ)とを鬻(ひさ)ぐ者(もの)有(あ)り

The completed kundoku translation with kun'yomi reads as a well-formed Japanese sentence:

楚 人 に 盾 と 矛 と を 鬻 ぐ 者 有 り
So hito ni tate to hoko to o hisa gu mono a ri
Chu man (subject) shields and spears and (direct object) sell- ing man wa- s

Coming full circle, this annotated Japanese kanbun example back-translates: "There was a man from Chu who was selling shields and spears. "

References

External links

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