An Historical Grammar of Japanese Oxford University Press London*
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tal Bookseller . Russell Street ^51 {, DON, W.C. I 2^. Presented to the library of the UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO from the estate of PROF. W.A.C.H. DOBSON AN HISTORICAL GRAMMAR OF JAPANESE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON*. AMEN HOUSE, E.C. 4 EDINBURGH GLASGOW LEIPZIG COPENHAGEN NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPETOWN BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS SHANGHAI HUMPHREY MILFORD PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY AN HISTORICAL GRAMMAR OF JAPANESE BY G. B. SANSOM, C.M.G. OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1928 L %\ 24 /# TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE SIR CHARLES ELIOT, G.C.M.G., C.B.,D.LITT., ETC., ETC., LATELY HIS MAJESTY'S AMBASSADOR TO JAPAN, AS A TOKEN OF RESPECT FOR HIS LEARNING AND GRATI- TUDE FOR HIS COUNSEL PREFACE THE chief object of this work is to provide material for study of the affiliations of the Japanese language, and, in so far as philological evidence is of value, for inquiry into the origins of the Japanese race ; but it has been so planned as to be, I hope, of interest to students of general linguistic theory. I trust also that advanced students of Japanese, especially those who wish to read early and medieval texts, will find it useful as a work of reference ; and even those who are concerned only with the modern spoken and written languages will, I believe, find many of their difficulties removed by gaining some knowledge of the development of grammatical forms and the growth of common idioms. The question of the racial origins of the people now inhabiting the Japanese archipelago has not yet been solved. Recently much attention has been paid to the Polynesian, as opposed to the 'Ural-Altaic' theory, but the philological arguments on both sides have as a rule been based on incom- plete data so far as concerns the vocabulary and grammatical structure of the Japanese language in its earliest known stages. In the following pages an attempt is made to remedy this deficiency, and I have purposely confined myself to a purely descriptive treatment, without conscious bias towards either theory, leaving it to comparative philologists to make use of the material supplied. It was my intention to furnish as an appendix an annotated vocabulary of Japanese in its earliest known forms, but the lists which I had compiled were, unfortunately, destroyed in the great earthquake of 1923. There exists, however, in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan (vol. xvi, pp. 225-85) a list compiled by Messrs. Chamberlain and Ueda which, I believe, requires but little revision in the light of recent research. The chief sources used for the following study were the treatises of the great pre-Restoration grammarians such as Motoori and Mabuchi and their annotated texts of the earliest viii PREFACE records and anthologies ; the indispensable studies of Aston, Chamberlain, and Satow, those great pioneer scholars, to whom all Western students owe praise and thanks ; various modern text-books on Japanese grammar ; and compilations made under the auspices of the Department of Education, such as the complete analysis of the vocabulary and gram- matical structure of the Heike Monogatari, published in two volumes, of 1,000 pages each, in 1913. 1 Of all these, I am most indebted to the works of Professor Yamada Koyii, whose great thesis on Japanese grammar ( 2fc 3£ ^ ffr) and studies of the language of the Nara, Heian, and Kamakura periods are amazing monuments of learning and industry. The examples of Japanese given in the course of the work are taken, in the case of classical and medieval usages, from the best available texts, and in the case of modern usages from the Readers published by the Department of Education or from newspapers and other contemporary documents. G. B. S. The British Embassy, Tokyo. 1 I regret that I have been unable to make use of recently dis- covered MSS. of the Heike Monogatari, which show that the work as usually known is refashioned from texts in an earlier language. CONTENTS Preface .... vn Introduction xi Abbreviations xv I. I. Introduction of Writing i 2. Further development of the Script and the representation of Japanese sounds 4i 3. Later developments of the language, and divergence between spoken and written forms 51 II. The Substantive . .69 The Pronoun, 71. Demonstrative pronouns, 73. Interrogative pronouns, 74. Indefinite pronouns, 75. Historical development of pro- noun, 76. Possessive pronouns, 80. Relative Pronouns, 81. Numerals, 82. Number in the substantive, 85. III. Predicative Words . .88 Verbs and adjectives, and their simple con- jugation . .90 IV. The Adjective . .98 Inflected adjectives, 98. Auxiliary adjectives, 109. Uninflected adjectives, 117. V. The Verb ..... 126 I. Simple conjugation, 126 : Stem, 129. Pre- dicative form, 130. Attributive form, 133. ' Conjunctive form, 137. Imperfect ' or negative base form, 140. Perfect form, 142. Imperative, 145. Substantival forms in -ku, 147. Development of conjugations, 151. 3270 b x CONTENTS V. The Verb (continued) : II. Compound Conjugation, 156 : Suffixes de- noting voice or aspect, 158. Suffixes form- ing causative verbs, 164. Suffixes denoting tense, &c, 173. Negative suffixes, 190. Un- infected verb suffixes, 196. Transitive and intransitive verbs, 199. VI. The Auxiliary verbs aru and suru . 202 Other auxiliary verbs . .221 VII. The Particles ..... 223 Case particles, 224. Adverbial particles, 255. Conjunctive particles, 272. Exclamatory particles, 280. VIII. The Adverb .... 288 IX. The Formation of Words 292 X. Grammatical Functions 304 XI. Syntax .... 313 Appendix. Comparison of spoken and written forms 341 Index 345 INTRODUCTION IN describing the development of the Japanese language it is convenient to divide it into stages corresponding to periods usually distinguished by Japanese historians ; and this method is particularly suitable because those periods coincide approximately with well-marked cultural phases. The earliest period to furnish written records of the lan- guage is the Nara period, coinciding roughly with the eighth century a. d., when the Court was at Nara. Works now extant which may be assigned to that period are : i. The Kojiki, or 'Record of Ancient Matters', completed in a. d. 713. A description of this chronicle, and some remarks on the evidential value of its text as reconstructed, will be found in Chapter I, pp. 15 et seq. Whatever doubts may be cast upon the reconstructed prose text, there is no doubt that the poems in the Kojiki are most valuable material. They represent the language of A. D. 700 at latest, and it is highly probable, since they bear every mark of antiquity, that they had already at that date been preserved by oral tradition for several centuries. 2. The Nihongi, or 'Chronicles of Japan', completed in a. d. 720. Only the poems and a few scattered sentences in this work are of value. 3. The Manyoshu, or 'Collection of a Myriad Leaves', an anthology of Japanese verse completed early in the ninth century a. d. , and containing some poemswhich go back at least as far as the late seventh century. Not all these poems are directly available as specimens of early forms of Japanese, since they are not all written phonetically ; but by collation with other poems in the same collection, and by reference back to the poems of the Kojiki and Nihongi, it is possible to reconstruct a great proportion of the native verse of the Nara period with a high degree of certainty. 4. The Shoku Nihongi, a continuation of the Nihongi, completed in 797. This work contains certain Imperial edicts in pure Japanese, and their texts can be restored with considerable accuracy. For translation and notes, see T.A.S.J. xii INTRODUCTION ' 5. The Engishiki, or Institutes of the Engi Period ', a code of ceremonial law promulgated in 927. This contains a num- ber of Shinto rituals, such as purifications and prayers for harvest, &c, which are evidently of great antiquity. There is strong internal evidence to show that these rituals belong to the Nara period at latest, and it is almost certain that they are among the oldest extant specimens of Japanese prose. For translation and notes, see Satow, T. A. S. J., vol. vii, of 1879. In addition to the above there are certain family records (R 3fc) and topographical records (Jig, J^ 12) which contain fragmentary material, but altogether it amounts to very little. There is only one stone monument of the Nara period bearing an inscription in Japanese—the so-called ' Footprint of Buddha ' (Bussokuseki) near Nara. All other inscriptions of that time are in Chinese. Unfortunately for philologists, so strong was the influence of Chinese learning in the eighth century that all the documents deposited by the Nara Court in the storehouse called the Shosoin, and marvellously pre- served until to-day, contain not more than a few dozen lines of Japanese. It will be seen from the foregoing account that the material for a grammar and vocabulary of Japanese of the Nara period is scanty, and that the bulk of it is in the form of poetry. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that our knowledge of the earliest forms of the language depends chiefly upon the Manyoshu. Following the Nara period comes the Heian period, so called because the centre of government was now at Heian-jo, the modern Kyoto. In the three centuries and more (a. d. 800-1186) comprised by this period there is no lack of material (vide Chapter I, pp. 53 et seq.). To it belong several important anthologies of verse, such as the Kokinshu ; romances, such as the Genji Monogatari ; diaries and miscel- lanies, such as the Tosa Nikki and the Makura no Soshi ; and a number of historical works such as the Sandai Jitsu- roku.