Language awareness: Japanese
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Working with languages in general
It's clear that Asian languages can present special challenges. But there are more general considerations about language that any scholar should be aware of. Keeping your awareness of language attuned can often be the key to finding your way through a forest of reference works and primary materials.
For example, using written materials means dealing with genres of texts and styles of language. While these two aspects of language use are closely interrelated, remembering the differences between them can be useful when you're looking for primary and secondary sources, and when you're looking for reference works to help you interpret what you've found. Below I give a rough outline of the issues involved.
Overviews of most of the Japanese-specific terms referred to in the discussion below can be found in reference works such as this:
- Nihongo hyakka daijiten. (= An encyclopaedia of the Japanese language). Kindaichi Haruhiko, Hayashi Ōki, Shibata Takeshi (henshū sekinin). Tōkyō: Taishūkan Shoten, 1988.
- 日本語百科大事典. 金田一春彥, 林大, 柴田武(編集責任). 東京: 大修館書店, 1988.
- PL511 .N5 1988
Ideally, each of the item headings below deserves its own Wiki page. In the meantime, readers are encouraged to explore on their own.
Genres (varieties of texts)
Every text is an instance of language use by a particular someone, designed for a particular audience, for a particular purpose. Texts fall into various types, called genres, depending on these factors (among others). Some scholars say that genres are organized according to people's expectations towards communicative situations. Here is a short list of some of the varieties of genres a scholar of Japanese Studies might expect to encounter:
- 漢詩
- 和歌
- 日記
- 書簡
- 布令
- 詔勅
- 祝詞
- 経
- 能
- 浄瑠璃
- 漫才
- 広告コピー
- 日常会話
(See the section below on Primary sources for actual examples online.)
To a certain extent a given text's genre will determine the variety of language that gets used in it.
Styles (varieties of language)
The variety of language one uses in a text depends on time, place, social status, the means and ends of communication, and the audience that text is designed for. Here is a short list of some of the styles you will find used (sometimes in combination) in one or another of the genres given in the previous section:
- 平安文・やまと言葉・古語・文語
- 漢文
- 読み下し文
- 変体漢文
- 和漢混淆文
- 候文
- 普通文・口語文・口語体
- 外来語・翻訳語
- 方言
- 女性語・おんな言葉・女房の言葉
- 幼児語
- 俗語
- 隠語
- 忌み言葉
- 敬語
- 皇室言葉
Being aware of the range of genres and styles is crucial to information literacy in any language. But Japanese has its own peculiar characteristics, including many divergent dialects, a variety of grammatically expressed forms of formality/politeness, and perhaps the most complex writing system ever developed. Part of what has brought about these peculiarites is the context of language use through history.
Contexts: Conditions of production and reproduction
Genres of texts and styles of language are subject to external factors in any instance of language use. All texts are initially produced in a material context and a literary context.
They are produced by people with agendas. They require an investment of time, resources, authority, etc. They have specific purposes, and are made with specific audiences in mind. This is all part of the material context.
To an interpreter of meaning, any text can be seen as a reaction to the texts that came before it (either in the history of philology, or just in the experience of the writer/speaker). Taken broadly, this is the literary context.
As a reaction to a given set of communicative acts, the production of a text (the next act) involves some intended effect on some intended audience, using some material medium. Put another way, because we people live in the world, the material context and the literary context of the texts we produce are deeply intertwined.
To the extent that it takes time to produce a given text, the parts that get produced earlier are context for the parts that get produced later. To the extent that sentences and strings of sentences are presented in a linear way, the earlier parts are context for interpreting the later parts.
Once a text comes into being, it can take on a life of its own.
Some texts get reproduced, or quoted, or cited, or annotated, or alluded to, or parodied, or emulated in other texts. Some texts get obeyed. Some get performed. Some get suppressed or forgotten or destroyed.
The dissemination of texts changes the potential for production of new texts. If the old romances had not survived and circulated, neither Cervantes nor Bradbury would ever have been able to write about the idea of abolishing them.
On the other hand, in a sense, a given text gets "reproduced" every time someone reads it and reinterprets it. So factors like literacy and the availability of written materials, accessabiilty of libraries, etc., are part of the conditions of reproduction too. For a given text, the question of who reads it (and to what end) is sometimes called that text's "reception".
Primary sources
Since we're talking about types of texts, we should look at some examples:
漢詩
Here is a website from 日本吟剣詩舞振興会, a public service corporation dedicated to promoting aspects of traditional Japanese performance culture: 漢詩
和歌
Here's a link to a famous collection of waka: 小倉百人一首.
書簡文
The Nippon Decimal Classification No. for diaries, letters, and gazetteers is 915.
You can access a few of these texts online at the Digital Archive Portal of the National Diet Library.
The National Diet Library's Kindai Digital Library has commentaries and analyses of epistolary Japanese at 近代ディジタルライブラリー. Select --> 語学 --> 日本語 --> 書簡文 (= Nippon Decimal Classification No. 816.6) to see 643 samples.
Intertextuality
"Those are my mother's words coming out of my mouth just now." Has a thought like that ever stopped you in mid-sentence? Whether consciously or not, we adopt other people's voices at some times, and quote other people's words at other times.
Inside almost any text, you can find embedded there another text.
We might use various turns of phrase to mark the kind of speech act we're engaging in as a request, an apology, a bedtime story: some special genre, embedded in a conversation.
Most of what we tend to say (as strings of words, at least) has already been uttered by someone else at some other time. And yet, every instance of communication is (as a specific use in a specific context) unique.
Texts inside of texts, next to other texts
Often you will find an allusion to a poem within another poem (a practice known as 本歌取り). In a critical anthology of poetry, you may find many such embeddings. The choice of the poems in the anthology (aside from the criticism therein) may even be interpreted as a commentary on previous anthologies. And a given poem may take on different meanings depending on whether and where it gets anthologized. Here is one study that addresses issues of intertextuality with reference to the poetry of 藤原俊成:
- "Lyricism and Intertextuality: An Approach to Shunzei's Poetics." Shirane, Haruo. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. Vol. 50. No. 1. Harvard-Yenching Institute, (June) 1990. (71-85).
While many intertextual references are consciously employed rhetorical devices, some aspects of intertextuality can be thought of as the product of historical forces, or even of pure accident. But intentional or accidental, intertextual juxtapositions can be used to great effect as an interpretive hermeneutic.
