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Descriptive Linguistics in Japan

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Descriptive Linguistics in Japan DESCRIPTIVE LINGUISTICS IN JAPAN HATTORI SHIRO I. A SURVEY OF THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT Japanese descriptive linguistics, together with kokugaku (national learning), belongs to the branches of learning which showed an original and peculiar development in Japan in the Edo period. In 1695, the Buddhist monk Keichu published a book, Waji shdransho, the result of his study of the origins of kana orthography. He had discovered that although corrupted in later documents, correct kana orthography could be found in the literary sources of the eight and ninth centuries. His free spirit and exact method of study greatly influenced contemporary scholars, and kokugaku, the study of the culture of Ancient Japan, became much more scientific than ever before. There then appeared a growing number of descriptive studies pertaining to the language of the old literary sources. These came now to occupy the center of scholarly interest. Scholars like Motoori Norinaga and Fujitani Nariakira came to consider that the kana orthography discovered by Keichu reflected the pronunciation of Ancient (Early Heian) Japanese. The detailed study of kana orthography of Japanese of the Nara period (the eighth century) was completed by Ishizuka Tatsumaro in Kanazukai oku no yamamichi (written before 1798) and the foundation was established for the study of the phonological system and structure of Archaic Japanese of Nara, which were different even from those of the early Heian period (the ninth century) and very differ- ent from those of Modern Japanese. On the other hand, due to the fact that the subject matter was limited to definite periods of Old (Nara and Early Heian) Japanese, the grammatical studies became synchronic and there appeared without any foreign influence a number of excellent descriptive researches. Remarkable contributions in this field were the first attempts to classify the parts of speech in Japanese by Fujitani Nariakira (1738-79) in his works Kazashisho (written in 1767), Ayuisho (written in 1773, but published in 1778), etc. In the first of these works he studied the interjections, conjunctions, adverbs, pronouns and prefixes; in the second work he turns his attention to the enclitic particles, "auxiliary verbs", and suffixes. His Yosoisho, a study on the verbs and adjectives, was lost. The great scholar Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801), known for his Kojikiden (1764-98) also contributed greatly to studies of grammar in his Kotoba DESCRIPTIVE LINGUISTICS IN JAPAN 531 no tama no o (completed in 1779, published in 1785), an excellent syntactical study of some of the particles, whereas his Mikuni kotoba katsuyosho (started in about 1782, published in 1886) classified the conjugations of verbs and adjectives. After Fujitani and Motoori came many scholars who described with success the grammar of Old Japanese, such as Suzuki Akira (1764-1837), Motoori Haruniwa (1763-1828), Tojo Gimon (1786-1843), and others. One must note as a characteristic of the grammatical studies of this period the fact that their main object was Old Japanese, that is, the language of the eighth-ninth centuries; as a consequence, when they refer to the spoken language of their time, it is only to draw comparisons with the ancient forms. Based as it was on materials culled only from ancient literary sources, this kind of grammatical study followed principally a deductive process based on a detailed study of the textual function (i.e., the distribution) of words and signemes.1 As for the meaning of words and signemes, the scholars endeavored to grasp it by analogy with present-day Japanese, and by making deductions from the context or from old dictionaries and the use of Chinese characters. Because the object of their study was Ancient Japanese, the meanings of the texts could hardly be grasped in the same precision and accuracy as is possible in the study of the modern language. For that very reason, however, they minutely investigated the textual function of words and signemes, and consequently descriptive studies developed which are admirable even from the present-day point of view. Another characteristic of the studies of the ancient language of the period under review may be said to be the fact that scholars applied to their own written language the rules they had discovered in their analysis of the ancient language. The kana orthography discovered by the monk Keichu became the orthography of the written language used by these scholars, and this language developed into the gikobufi (the imitated ancient language) which made use of the grammar and the vocabulary of ancient texts. In the Meiji era (1868-1912) this language, mixed with the written languages of the traditional Sino-Japanese reading style and the epistolary style, evolved into what was called futsubun (the common written language). The distance, however, between this written language and the normal spoken language of the time had become so great that a movement started in the Meiji era to develop a written language based on the spoken idiom, which became known as the genbun itchiron, the "write as you speak" movement. Especially since 1895 the litterateurs and other writers who entered this movement created after a while a written language called kdgobun (the written language in the spoken style), which has by the present day almost superseded all other styles in writing Japanese. As a consequence, the beginning of the Meiji era saw the grammatical studies becoming necessarily oriented towards the study of the daily spoken language. It is true that the philologists of the Edo period often referred to the spoken language in their study of the classical language. A good example can be seen in Motoori Haruni- wa's work, Kotoba no yachimata (written in 1806, published in 1808), in which he 1 These are what L. Bloomfield called "morphemes"; see Hattori Shiro (1964a), fn. 1. 532 HATTORI SHIRO referred to the system of verbal conjugations of the spoken language. However, real descriptive study of the spoken language did not progress very far during that period, mainly because too great a respect was shown to the ancient language, called "elegant language", and one looked down on the spoken language as "vulgar speech". Even when as in the Meiji era, the necessity of the study of the spoken language was advocated, this study never progressed satisfactorily; among the many reasons for this, we wish to underline specially the two following factors: 1. Even in its incomplete shape, the grammatical study of the ancient language had already been worked out, and scholars tried to write the grammar of the spoken language in the framework of that of the ancient language. It was no easy task to eliminate this tendency which remained for a long time. Notwithstanding the evident relationship between the ancient language and the modern spoken language, more than a thousand years had elapsed between the two, resulting in great differences in structure and system. Therefore a descriptive study of the modern language could not be done in the framework of the grammar of the ancient language without distorting the description. 2. With the introduction of many Western scientific disciplines after the Meiji restoration, the garmmars of English and the other European languages also became known to our country. On the other hand, the study of Japanese by Westerners, already sporadically seen during the Edo period,2 led to the publication of Japanese grammars by J. J. Hoffman (1867) and W. G. Aston (1871). B. H. Chamberlain was commissioned by the Japanese Ministry of Education to write Nihon shoburiten [An elementary Japanese grammar], published in 1888. These works tried to describe the Japanese language in the frame of the structures and systems of Western languages, especially English, and cannot be called very successful. On the contrary, grammatical notions concerning the European languages, introduced by these works had to some extent a distorting influence on the descriptive study of Japanese. As a representative work of this period, we may quote Otsuki Fumihiko's Detailed Japanese grammar (written in 1882, printed in 1897).3 It is a description of the grammar of classical Japanese of the ninth to eleventh centuries, embodying in its description of conjuga- tions the results of studies by Japanese philologists, but it was influenced by Western grammars, especially in its classification of the parts of speech. A short time later, however, an epoch-making work succeeded in casting off this foreign influence; Yamada Yoshio's A Japanese grammar (partly published in 1902, completed in 1908), by striving to grasp the structure and system of the Japanese language as such, put grammatical studies on their true course. Here again, however, the subject of the study was the "modern standard written language", namely, what we have called above the "common written language", which was very different from the daily speech of that time. 2 The oldest of these works is Joao Rodriguez, S. J., Arte da lingoa de Japam, Nagasaki, 1604—1608. 3 Hereafter all works recorded in the Bibliography will be referred to by their translated titles. For the Japanese titles and the renderings in English, see the Bibliography. DESCRIPTIVE LINGUISTICS IN JAPAN 533 But as a result of the "write as you speak" movement, alluded to above, the need was felt for descriptive grammars of the spoken language; articles and books treating this subject start to appear in succession around the year 1900. We have first works like the book Grammar of Colloquial Japanese (1901) by Matsushita Daisaburo in which the description of the daily spoken language was attempted. Meanwhile, the need for establishing a common standard language was stressed, and as "the written language of spoken style" became established, the tendency to describe this language became more and more pronounced. The Ministry of Education published in 1906 the results of a dialect investigation conducted by the Japanese Language Commission, called Report on a survey of the grammar of the spoken language; the same commission published in 1916 a Spoken language grammar which was in reality a normative grammar of the spoken standard.
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