[Multilingual Monday] Lost in Translation IV: Fun with kanbun
FINALLY I find sources on kanbun, and I intend on finding more of them!! I found An Introduction to Kambun by Sydney Crawcour, and it's rather fascinating -- at least to me. :: laugh ::
Kanbun, for those who missed my prior rantings, is a system of reading (or even writing) classical Chinese through a series of marks that tell the reader how to rearrange the sentence, along with supplementary kana that should be put between the original Chinese. I collect old Japanese books and quite a few are written in kanbun, including the oldest one I have which talks about rime tables.
But ohh, it's not that easy! I completely forgot that, even if I rearrange the sentence, and put in the supplementary kana, it's then written in CLASSICAL Japanese, which is quite a different beast from modern Japanese. So, in essence, I would be meandering through three languages to interpret the text. :: laugh ::
And the problem is that I don't care how good a translation is, something is different from the original source, and in this case the kanbun system is very systematic to the point where meanings are lost because of the mechanical nature of the system. A great example is exclamations -- 鳴,唉, 呼, and 嗟 all have specific "feelings" to them from anguish to excitement, but these all become blunted in kanbun, becoming a general ああ, ah. Emphasizing particles between two statements such as 則 or 乃 get translated as すなはち, sunawachi, "thereupon", when such particles are closer to the English "none other than" or "in actuality." ending particles like 也 just get left alone and remain in the Japanese even though it had no meaning or use in Japanese, but in this system each character had to be accounted for no matter how redundant or pointless in Japanese.
so certainly it's not perfect and obviously no system can be between two languages, particularly two as different as Chinese and Japanese. But it's still an intriguing system, and is one that is allowing me a closer understanding of a bed of literature that I had limited access to before. Through kanbun I can see a number of expressions and words that have crept into the Japanese language because of the extent of people Reading and writing Chinese through kanbun.
Kanbun, for those who missed my prior rantings, is a system of reading (or even writing) classical Chinese through a series of marks that tell the reader how to rearrange the sentence, along with supplementary kana that should be put between the original Chinese. I collect old Japanese books and quite a few are written in kanbun, including the oldest one I have which talks about rime tables.
But ohh, it's not that easy! I completely forgot that, even if I rearrange the sentence, and put in the supplementary kana, it's then written in CLASSICAL Japanese, which is quite a different beast from modern Japanese. So, in essence, I would be meandering through three languages to interpret the text. :: laugh ::
And the problem is that I don't care how good a translation is, something is different from the original source, and in this case the kanbun system is very systematic to the point where meanings are lost because of the mechanical nature of the system. A great example is exclamations -- 鳴,唉, 呼, and 嗟 all have specific "feelings" to them from anguish to excitement, but these all become blunted in kanbun, becoming a general ああ, ah. Emphasizing particles between two statements such as 則 or 乃 get translated as すなはち, sunawachi, "thereupon", when such particles are closer to the English "none other than" or "in actuality." ending particles like 也 just get left alone and remain in the Japanese even though it had no meaning or use in Japanese, but in this system each character had to be accounted for no matter how redundant or pointless in Japanese.
so certainly it's not perfect and obviously no system can be between two languages, particularly two as different as Chinese and Japanese. But it's still an intriguing system, and is one that is allowing me a closer understanding of a bed of literature that I had limited access to before. Through kanbun I can see a number of expressions and words that have crept into the Japanese language because of the extent of people Reading and writing Chinese through kanbun.