Kanbun - Conventions and Terminology

Conventions and Terminology

Compositions written in kanbun used two common types of Japanese kanji (漢字?, "Chinese characters") readings: Sino-Japanese on'yomi (音読み "pronunciation readings") borrowed from Chinese pronunciations and native Japanese kun'yomi (訓読み?, "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, street".

Kanbun implemented two particular types of kana: okurigana (送り仮名?, "accompanying script"), "kana suffixes added to kanji stems to show their Japanese readings" and furigana (振り仮名?, "brandishing script"), "smaller kana syllables printed/written alongside kanji to indicate pronunciation".

Kanbun – as opposed to Wabun (ja:和文?, "Wa (Japan) writing") meaning "Japanese text, composition written with Japanese syntax and predominately kun'yomi readings" – is subdivided into several types.

• jun-kanbun (純漢文?, "pure/genuine Chinese writing") "Chinese text, composition written with Chinese syntax and on'yomi Chinese characters"
• hakubun (白文?, "white/blank writing") "unpunctuated kanbun text without reading aids"
• Wakan konkōbun (ja:和漢混交文?, "mingled Japanese and Chinese writing") "Sino-Japanese composition written with Japanese syntax and mixed on'yomi and kun'yomi readings"
• hentai-kanbun (ja:変体漢文?, "deviant/abnormal Chinese writing") "Chinese modified with Japanese syntax; a Japanized version of classical Chinese"

Jean-Noël Robert describes kanbun as a "perfectly frozen, 'dead,' language" that was continuously used from the late Heian Period until after World War II.

Classical Chinese, which, as we have seen, had long since ceased to be a spoken language on the mainland (if indeed it had ever had been), has been in use in the Japanese archipelago longer than the Japanese language itself. The oldest written remnants found in Japan are all in Chinese, though it is a matter of considerable debate whether traces of the Japanese vernacular are to be found in them. Taking both languages together until the end of the nineteenth century, and taking into account all the monastic documents, literature in the widest sense of the term, and texts in "near-Chinese" (hentai-kanbun), it is entirely possible that the sheer volume of texts written in Chinese in Japan slightly exceed what was written in Japanese. (2006:32)

Inasmuch as Classical Chinese was originally unpunctuated, the kanbun tradition developed various conventional reading punctuation, diacritical, and syntactic markers.

• kunten (訓点?, "explanation mark") "guiding marks for rendering Chinese into Japanese"
• kundoku (ja:訓読?, "explanation reading") "the Japanese reading/pronunciation of a kanji character"
• kanbun kundoku (ja:漢文訓読?, "Chinese writing Japanese reading") "a Japanese reading of a Chinese passage"
• okototen (ja:乎古止点?, "inflectional dot marks") "diacritical dots on characters to indicate Japanese grammatical inflections"
• kutōten (ja:句読点?, "phrase reading marks") "punctuation marks (e.g., 、comma and 。 period)"
• kaeriten (ja:返り点?, "return marker") "marks placed alongside characters indicating their Japanese ordering is to be 'returned' (read in reverse)"

Kaeriten grammatically transform Classical Chinese into Japanese word order. Two are syntactic symbols, the | tatesen (ja:縦線?, "vertical bar") "linking mark" denotes phrases and the レ reten (レ点?, " re mark") denotes "return/reverse marks". The rest are kanji commonly used in numbering and ordering systems: 4 numerals ichi 一 "one", ni 二 "two", san 三 "three", and yon 四 "four"; 3 locatives ue 上 "top", naka 中 "middle", and shita 下 "bottom"; 4 Heavenly Stems kinoe 甲 "first", kinoto 乙 "second", hinoe 丙 "third", and hinoto 丁 "fourth"; and the 3 cosmological sansai (三才, "three worlds", see Wakan Sansai Zue?) ten 天 "heaven", chi 地 "earth", and jin 人 "person". For written English, these kaeriten would correspond with 1, 2, 3; I, II, III; A, B, C, etc.

As an analogy for kanbun "mentally changing the word order" from Chinese sentences with subject–verb–object (SVO) into Japanese subject–object–verb (SOV), John DeFrancis (1989:132) gives this example of using an English (another SVO language) literal translation to render the Latin (another SOV) Commentarii de Bello Gallico opening.

DeFrancis (1989:133) 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 by Crawcour (1965, reviewed by Ury 1990; available for download here: ) and Komai and Rohlich (1988, reviewed by Markus 1990 and Wixted 1998).