Early Japanese Lexicography
The first Japanese dictionaries are no longer extant and only known by titles. For example, the Nihon Shoki (tr. Aston 1896:354) says Emperor Temmu was presented a dictionary in 682 CE, the Niina (新字, "New Characters") with 44 fascicles (kan 巻). The earliest dictionaries made in Japan were not for the Japanese language but rather dictionaries of Chinese characters written in Chinese and annotated in Japanese.
Japanese lexicography flowered during the Heian Period, when Chinese culture and Buddhism began to spread throughout Japan. During the Kamakura and Muromachi eras, despite advances in woodblock printing technology, there was a decline in lexicography that Bailey (1960:22) describes as "a tendency toward simplification and popularization".
The following review of the first major Japanese dictionaries is divided into the above lexicographical jikeibiki, bunruitai, and onbiki types.
Read more about this topic: Japanese Dictionary
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or japanese:
“I do not know that I meet, in any of my Walks, Objects which move both my Spleen and Laughter so effectually, as those Young Fellows ... who rise early for no other Purpose but to publish their Laziness.”
—Richard Steele (1672–1729)
“A pragmatic race, the Japanese appear to have decided long ago that the only reason for drinking alcohol is to become intoxicated and therefore drink only when they wish to be drunk.
So I went out into the night and the neon and let the crowd pull me along, walking blind, willing myself to be just a segment of that mass organism, just one more drifting chip of consciousness under the geodesics.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)