Comparing what has been said above with what the author tells us in his Preface, the nature of the text, so far as language is concerned, will be easily understood. The Songs are written phonetically, syllable by syllable, in what is technically known as Manyō-Gana, i.e. entire Chinese characters used to represent sound and not sense. The rest of the text, which is in prose, is very poor Chinese, capable (owing to the ideographic nature of the Chinese written character[1]), of being read off into Japanese. It is also not only full of “Japonisms,” but irregularly interspersed with characters which turn the text into nonsense for a Chinaman, as they are used phonetically to represent certain Japanese words, for which the author could not find suitable Chinese equivalents. These phonetically written words prove, even apart from the notice in the Preface, that the text was never meant to be read as pure Chinese. The probability is that (sense being considered more important than sound) it was read partly in Chinese and partly in Japanese, according to a mode which has since been systematized and has become almost universal in this country even in the reading of genuine Chinese texts. The modern school of Japanese literati, who push their hatred of everything foreign to the bounds of fanaticism, contend however that this, their most ancient and revered book, was from the first intended to be read exclusively into Japanese. Drawing from the other sources of our knowledge of the Archaic Dialect, Motowori has even hazarded a restoration of the Japanese reading of the entire prose text, in the whole of which not a single Chinese word is used, excepting for the titles of the two Chinese books (the “Confucian Analects” and the “Thousand Character Essay”) which are said to have been brought over to Japan in the reign of the Emperor Ō-jin, and for the names of a Korean King and of three or four other Koreans and Chinese. Whatever may be their opinion on the question at issue, most European scholars, to
- ↑ The translator adopts the term “ideographic,” because it is that commonly used and understood, and because this is not the place to demonstrate its inappropriateness. Strictly speaking, “logographic” would be preferable to “ideographic,” the difference between Chinese characters and alphabetic writing being that the former represent in their entirety the Chinese words for things and ideas, whereas the latter dissects into their component sounds the words of the languages which it is employed to write.
