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Kanbun

Japanese method of reading Literary Chinese

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Before the widespread use of kana, which developed from cursive forms and components of Chinese characters, Literary Sinitic was extensively used in Japan for official, religious, intellectual, and literary writing. The large surviving corpus includes Chinese classics and Buddhist texts as well as works composed in Japan.

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 kanshi (漢詩; 'Chinese poetry'). Burton Watson's English translations of kanbun compositions provide an introduction to this literary field.

The earliest securely dated Japanese materials with return marks are from 783 and 788, although the older of the two may reproduce glossing from Silla; related evidence suggests that the practice began by the late Nara period or earlier. A nationally standardized school convention for reading marks was adopted in 1912.

Kanbun is described by Jean-Noël Robert as a "perfectly frozen 'dead'" 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 Sinitic writing itself, kanbun can refer to techniques for reading Chinese texts as Japanese or to Japanized forms of Sinitic writing. Samuel Martin coined the term Sino-Xenic in 1953 for Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean, Sino-Vietnamese, and comparable traditions of Chinese-derived readings and vocabulary. Japanese kundoku has parallels in historical Korean and other East Asian traditions for reading Literary Sinitic. In Japan it has remained continuously and widely used, while modern Korean normally reads such texts with Sino-Korean pronunciations even though glossing traditions such as gugyeol have historical and modern successors.

In the Japanese kanbun reading tradition, punctuation and reading marks guide the analysis of a Sinitic text and its rendering into a conventional Classical Japanese register. Fixed correspondences connect many Chinese words and constructions with Japanese readings, particles, inflections, and word-order changes, although the correspondence is not mechanically one-to-one.

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 postpositions such as grammar particles that appear after 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.

Nishogakusha University maintains a public Kanbun Database and an international research programme based on Japanese kanbun sources.

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