Kanbun
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For the 17th-century Japanese era, see Kanbun (era).
Kanbun (漢文, literally "Han writing") is Chinese written for a Japanese audience.
Before the advent of the modern Japanese writing system and the kana syllabaries, kanbun was used to compose original Japanese texts. Today kanbun is used primarily to annotate classical Chinese and is a required subject in high school, so in modern Japanese, the word "kanbun" can be also used to refer to classical Chinese literature as a whole.
Modern kanbun employs a set of marks known as kaeriten (返り点?), lit. "return points" or kunten (訓点?), "Japanese points". For example, the following line by Han Fei Zi:
- 楚人有鬻盾與矛者
would be written with kaeriten as:
- 楚人有下鬻二盾與一レ矛者上
To read this, the character marked with 下 (down) is shifted to the location marked by 上 (up), and likewise the character marked with 二 (two) is shifted to the location marked by 一 (one). The reverse mark レ indicates that the order of the adjacent characters must be reversed. Step by step, the sentence thus becomes:
- 楚人盾矛與鬻者有
And the final sentence is now in the Japanese Subject Object Verb order. At this point conjugations can be added with okurigana and character readings can be annotated with furigana:
- 楚人に盾と矛とを鬻ぐ者有り
The completed translation is known as kundoku (訓読?) or "Japanese reading".
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