Kiyoshi Awaka (阿 波 加 清 志 、 1936‐ 1988)
Akiyuki Jimura (Hiroshima University)
The late Professor Kiyoshi Awaka, of the Faculty of Humanities and SocialSciences, Mie University, died on the seventh of November, 1988. He was 52 years old,and his research, to say nothing of his human existence, was left uncompleted.
Kiyoshi Awaka was born in Toyama Prefecture on the 6th of June, 1936. Heentered Tohoku University to study English language and literature, after he graduatedfrom Toyama-chubu Senior High School. Then he went on to the Graduate School ofLetters, Tohoku University and studied English language and literature. After heobtained a Master’s Degree at Tohoku University, he got a teaching job at a senior highschool for two years. In 1963 he had a teaching job at Kinjyo Gakuin Junior College(Nagoya), and in December he became Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Education,
Mie University. He became Associate Professor in 1967 and Professor in 1975. He
moved to a newly-created faculty, the Faculty of Humanities, Mie University, in 1983.
He did most of the planning for the educational program of the new faculty as aprofessional staff member of the academic affairs section when the Faculty ofHumanities was founded. He made a great contribution to the development of this new
faculty, taking the role of the chairperson of academic affairs and being a member of theoperating committee of the faculty.
Professor Awaka trained a number of young scholars, guiding them with great
learning and large experience, to say nothing of his teaching in Middle English andEnglish Philology. He published a number of academic articles and contributed to theadvancementofscholarship,especiallythroughdevelopmentssuchascomputer-assisted concordances.
His research mainly focused on grammatical studies of the Middle English

Ancrene Wisse with special reference to metaphorical expressions, repetitions, genitives
and word order.
In “Ancrene Riwle no Hanpuku to Gojun” (1964) (“Repetition and Word-order inthe Ancrene Riwle”), Awaka indicates a variety of rhetorical devices including

alliteration, anacoluthon, and tautology, which make the preaching effective. He also
states that the rhetorical devices such as anaphora and epanadiplosis have muchinfluence on the word-order. In “Ancrene Riwle niokeru Zokkaku” (1965) (“On Genitives
in the Ancrene Riwle”), he discusses the uses of genitives synchronically, classifying theexpressions involving genitives and making use of statistical analysis. In “Þe Lifladeant te Passiun of St. Iuliene no Gojun – Shugo, Doushi, Mokutekigo wo Chushin ni”(1967) (“Word-order in Þe Liflade ant te Passiun of St. Iuliene: With Special Reference
to Subjects, Verbs and Objects”), he indicates the regular patterns of word-order in Þe

Liflade ant te Passiun of St. Iuliene, though the word-order in Middle English is said tobe comparatively free. In “Ancrene Riwle niokeru Daimeishi-Mokutekigo no Ichi” (1968)(“On the Positions of Pronominal Objects in the Ancrene Riwle”), he clarifies thecharacteristics of the word-order SOV, investigating the positions of pronominal objects
in the Ancrene Riwle. In “A Note on Middle English Neveu” (1979), he reexamines themeaning of neveu, since he has a doubt about the definition of this word in the Middle

English Dictionary. He also shows his historical interest in some grammatical features
such as comparison. In “Hikaku Henka no Keitai Henka －-er, -est kara more, most e?”(1969) (“The Change of Comparison in Present-day English: From Inflectional toPeriphrastic?”), he expresses doubt about the general change from inflectional toperiphrastic forms of comparison in Present-day English, investigating statistically theusage in novels, essays, plays, etc. published about 1900 and after 1950.
Then he moved on to textual studies of the Ancrene Wisse, comparing Ancrene

Riwle with Ancrene Wisse. He published his articles: “A Parallel Text of Ancrene Riwle
and Ancrene Wisse (1), (2), (3) and (4)” (1974-1977), in one of which he says:“in this paper a part of the texts is edited, for the convenience of the various studies ofthe work, from the two important English versions. One of them is called Cotton MS
Nero A. xiv, in the British Museum, which contains the text of the Ancrene Riwle(AR), and the other is CCCC MS 402 (MS 402 of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge),
which contains the text of the Ancrene Wisse (AW)” (Awaka 1974: 1).
He finished transcribing the two manuscripts. His scrupulous textual studies of theAncrene Wisse led to his careful Japanese translation of the text. He translated theoriginal text of the Ancrene Wisse into Japanese, consulting several manuscripts of thework. He published his translations over seven years, 1980-1986. They contributed toscholarship through their method of Japanese translation, because they were based
upon the manuscripts, following the model of the late Professor Kikuo Miyabe’stranslation of the Ancrene Wisse. It was fortunate that he had finally completed editing
his new text of the Ancrene Wisse, making use of a personal computer, though thedata-based study of literary works was not easy to perform at that time. In 1982 he also
published his first transcription of The Pains of Sin, which was contained in the Bodley
MS., Eng. Poet a. 1, generally known as the Vernon MS and written in England in thelate 14th century. He faithfully transcribed the manuscript and added a modernizationof the text.

In 1986 he read his paper “Ancrene Wisse no Hyoudai” (“The Title of the AncreneWisse”) at the 58th General Meeting of the English Literary Society of Japan; thearticle was in a way a condensation of the researches he undertook over long years.
Though this work was generally known as the Ancrene Riwle, he had the original
opinion that it would be more appropriate for us to use the title Ancrene Wisse, judging
from the following evidences. The Ancren Riwle was named by J. Morton, the first
editor of this work, but the form Ancrene Riwle was widely used in academic circles,
since the form ancrene was grammatically correct as a genitive plural of the noun.
However, in the text we could find only the compound expression “ancre riwle” and so
we should not be too obsessive about regarding ancrene as the only genitive plural form.
The interpretation of wisse remains unsolved by scholars. Investigating words
postposed after genitives, he found verbal nouns and nominal uses of adjectives in thisposition, but did not find examples of the nominal uses of infinitives. Therefore, we were
not able to conclude that Old English infinitive wissian became the Middle English

wisse, though it would be proper for us to regard the Middle English wisse as thenominalized form of the Old English adjective wis (or wiss). Finally, he interpreted themeaning of the title Ancrene Wisse as ‘guidance or knowledge for the anchoress’.
He concentrated his energy on making computer-assisted concordances of Middle
English texts. He began by ascertaining the text on the basis of the manuscripts, when
making the concordance of the Ancrene Wisse. The number of tokens of Middle English
words in the Ancrene Wisse is 70,198, each of which was collected systematically andcomprehensively by his computer programme. The summary of this project waspublished in his article “Pasokon Riyo no Ancrene Wisse Konkodansu” (“AComputer-assisted Concordance of the Ancrene Wisse”), Festschrift for the Retirementof Professor Sachiho Tanaka (Kirihara-shoten, 1988).
Professor Awaka was a pioneer figure in editing the text of the Ancrene Wisse on
the basis of his scrupulous reading of the manuscripts, putting its textual informationin database form. His database of the Ancrene Wisse was the first noteworthy
achievement of this kind in the world. His contribution to the electronic scholarship led
to Electronic Parallel Diplomatic Manuscript Texts of Ancrene Wisse, by Tokyo
Medieval Manuscript Reading Group (2000-2001), the group which published The

Ancrene Wisse, A Four-Manuscript Parallel Text, Preface and Parts 1-4, edited byTadao Kubouchi and Keiko Ikegami with John Scahill, Shoko Ono, Harumi Tanabe,Yoshiko Ota, Ayako Kobayashi and Koichi Nakamura, 2003 and The Ancrene Wisse, A

Four-Manuscript Parallel Text, Parts 5-8 with Wordlists, edited by Tadao Kubouchi andKeiko Ikegami with John Scahill, Shoko Ono, Harumi Tanabe, Yoshiko Ota, Ayako

Kobayashi and Koichi Nakamura, 2005.
Last but not least, I would like to conclude this essay, by quoting a part of myreview article (Studies in English Literature (English Number 1996), 99-105), whichsets out Professor Awaka’s great achievement, comparing his concordance with Potts,
Stevenson, and Wogan-Browne’s Concordance to Ancrene Wissse: MS Corpus ChristiCollege Cambridge 402 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993)
We have to notice the merits of Awaka’s concordance. First, hisconcordance uses modern punctuation, with proper nouns
modernized and the upper cases consistently used. On theother hand, Potts, Stevenson, and Wogan-Browne’s is faithful
to the original manuscript, in that it does not always use uppercases. Second, Awaka’s concordance changes the abbreviatedletters of the manuscript into

theunabbreviated.

Those

unabbreviated in Awaka’s text should have been italicized. The
third problem shows us that it is difficult to decide which word
is a compound in Awaka’s text. Awaka’s concordance is faithful
to the original manuscript in this respect, but we should
sometimes regard two separate words in the manuscript as one
compound word when we transcribe the manuscript, e.g.
“ancre wununge,” or “hire seolf,” where a hyphen should beinserted between the words. To sum up, Awaka’s concordanceis practical and exhaustive and should be very useful tomedieval scholars. Potts, Stevenson and Wogan-Browne’s
concordance is for the most part mostly too faithful to theoriginal manuscript and has many printing problems, thelatter which would make it more difficult to use. (Jimura: 103)