Kanbun

Kanbun (漢文 'Han writing') is a system for writing Literary Chinese used in Japan from the Nara period until the 20th century. Much of Japanese literature was written in this style and it was the general writing style for official and intellectual works throughout the period. As a result, Sino-Japanese vocabulary makes up a large portion of the Japanese lexicon and much classical Chinese literature is accessible to Japanese readers in some resemblance of the original.
The Japanese writing system originated through adoption and adaptation of written Chinese. Some of Japan's oldest books (e.g. the Nihon Shoki) and dictionaries (e.g. the Tenrei Banshō Meigi and Wamyō Ruijushō) were written in kanbun. Other Japanese literary genres have parallels; the Kaifūsō is the oldest collection of kanshi (漢詩, 'Chinese poetry'). Burton Watson's English translations of kanbun compositions provide an introduction to this literary field.
Samuel Martin coined the term Sino-Xenic in 1953 to describe Chinese as written in Japan, Korea, and other foreign (hence -xenic) zones on China's periphery. Roy Andrew Miller notes that although Japanese kanbun conventions have Sino-Xenic parallels with other traditions for reading Literary Chinese like Korean hanmun and Vietnamese Hán Văn, only kanbun has survived to the present day. He explains how
William C. Hannas points out the linguistic hurdles involved in kanbun transformation.
He lists four major Japanese problems: word order, parsing which Chinese characters should be read together, deciding how to pronounce the characters, and finding suitable equivalents for Chinese function words.
According to John Timothy Wixted, scholars have disregarded kanbun.
A new development in kanbun studies is the Web-accessible database being developed by scholars at Nishogakusha University in Tokyo.
The Japanese word kanbun originally meant 'Literary Chinese writings'—or, the Chinese classics. Kanbun compositions used two common types of Japanese kanji readings: Sino-Japanese on'yomi ('pronunciation readings') borrowed from Chinese pronunciations and native Japanese kun'yomi 'explanation readings' from Japanese equivalents. For example, 道 can be read as dō adapted from Middle Chinese /dấw/ or as michi from the indigenous Japanese word meaning 'road'.
Kanbun implemented two particular types of kana. One was okurigana 'accompanying script', kana suffixes added to kanji stems to show their Japanese readings; the other was furigana 'brandishing script', smaller kana syllables written alongside kanji to indicate pronunciation. These were used primarily as reinforcements to writing in kanbun. Kanbun—as opposed to Wabun (和文, 'Wa writing'), Japanese text with Japanese syntax and predominately kun'yomi readings—is divided into several types:
Jean-Noël Robert describes kanbun as a "perfectly frozen, 'dead'" language that was continuously used from the late Heian period (794–1185) until after World War II:
As Literary Chinese originally lacked punctuation, the kanbun tradition developed various conventional reading punctuation, diacritical, and syntactic markers.
Kaeriten grammatically transforms Literary Chinese into Japanese word order. Two are syntactic symbols, the | tatesen (縦線, 'vertical bar')—linking mark that denotes phrases composed of more than one character, and the レ reten (レ点, '[katakana] re mark') denotes 'reverse marks'. The rest are kanji commonly used in numbering and ordering systems:
As an analogy for kanbun changing the word order from Chinese sentences with subject–verb–object (SVO) into Japanese subject–object–verb (SOV), John DeFrancis gives this example of using a literal English translation—another SVO language—of the opening of the Latin-language Commentarii de Bello Gallico.
DeFrancis adds, "A better analogy would be the reverse situation–Caesar rendering an English text in his native language and adding Latin case endings."
Two English textbooks for students of kanbun are An Introduction to Kambun by Sydney Crawcour, reviewed by Marian Ury in 1990, and An Introduction to Japanese Kanbun by Komai and Rohlich, reviewed by Andrew Markus in 1990 and Wixted in 1998.
The illustration to the right exemplifies kanbun. These eight words comprise the well-known first line in the Han Feizi story (ch. 36) that first coined the term máodùn (Japanese mujun, 矛盾 'contradiction, inconsistency', lit. "spear-shield"), illustrating the irresistible force paradox. Debating with a Confucianist about the legendary Chinese sage rulers Yao and Shun, the Legalist Han Fei argues that one cannot praise them both because that would be making a "spear–shield" contradiction.
The first sentence would read thus, using modern Standard Chinese pronunciation:
A fairly literal translation would be "among Chu people, there existed somebody who was selling shields and spears". All words can be literally translated into English, except for the final particle zhě 者 'one who', 'somebody who', which works as nominalizer marking a verb phrase as certain kinds of noun phrases. The original Chinese sentence is marked with five Japanese kaeriten as:
To interpret this, The re レ 'reverse' mark indicates that the order of the adjacent characters, 與 and 矛, must be reversed:
The word 有 'existed' marked with shita 下 'bottom' is shifted after 者 marked by ue 上 'top':
Likewise, the word 鬻 'sell' marked with ni 二 'two' is shifted to after 與 marked by ichi 一 'one':
To represent this reading in numerical terms:
Following these kanbun instructions step by step transforms the sentence so it has the typical Japanese subject–object–verb argument order. The Sino-Japanese on'yomi readings and meanings are:
Next, Japanese function words and conjugations can be added with okurigana, and Japanese to ... to と...と 'and' can substitute Chinese 與 'and'. More specifically, the first と is treated as an additional function word, and the second, the reading of 與:
Lastly, kun'yomi readings for characters can be annotated with furigana. Normally furigana are only used for uncommon kanji or unusual readings. This sentence's only uncommon kanji is hisa(gu) 鬻ぐ 'sell', 'deal in', a literary character which is included in neither the kyōiku kanji nor the jōyō kanji lists. However, in kanbun texts it is relatively common to use a large amount of furigana—often there is an interest in recovering the readings used by people of the Heian or Nara periods, and since many kanji can be read either with on'yomi or kun'yomi pronunciations in a kanbun text, the furigana can show at least one editor's opinion of how it may have been read.
The completed kundoku translation reads as a well-formed Japanese sentence with kun'yomi:
This annotated kanbun translates to, "among Chu people, there existed one who was selling shields and spears".
To illustrate what is possible with kaeriten, here follows a rather complicated example from Crawcour's book, to which he notes: "The student may take some light comfort from the fact that this is as complicated as these markings can get."
is rendered as
Kanbun were added to the Unicode Standard in June 1993 with version 1.1. Two Unicode kaeriten are grammatical symbols (㆐㆑) for linking and reverse marks. The others are the organizational kanji for numerals (e.g. ㆒), locatives (e.g. ㆖), Heavenly Stems (e.g. ㆙), and levels (e.g. ㆝).
The Unicode block for kanbun is U+3190..319F: