It's summer and time to focus on the wonderful minutiae that professors love. My own work is currently pointed at a scholar of religious studies, Anesaki Masaharu 姉崎正治. I'm looking at a series of open letters that he published in the Meiji journal Taiyō 太陽 in 1902. The content is a dissertation in itself, but as an aside I've been musing about the language that he uses. Those of you studying modern Japanese would not recognize it. Sure, it is in classical Japanese, but besides that, the punctuation is anomalous and the diction is entirely different from the prose that the same writer produced in the same decade.
All this has led me to wonder about linguistic "rules" (as such) of the Meiji period. Did this essay seem unusual to the readership? It certainly seems odd now. And other material written at the turn of the century didn't necessary use the same conventions. Don't get me wrong--it isn't just a difference between classical and modern grammar--there is a qualitative difference beyond that which I find odd.
Thoughts, anyone?
2 comments:
How much does the content differ from his usual writings? Maybe he was experimenting with a new tone, for any number of reasons, such as an effort to attract different audiences. Is it generally more artistic? Perhaps it wasn't written by him at all.
Good guesses, all. The style is different, but the genre (open letter to the editor) probably influences that greatly. It isn't artistic so much as stream of consciousness, with no punctuation but commas which indicate either a pause or the end of a sentence. I'm sure that he wrote it, though, because the content is dead on to the other materials that he produced that decade.
On a related note, I was recently reading a speech that Mori Ogai made in response to Anesaki's letter, and in doing so was reminded of how often I find having studied Mandarin useful in reading Meiji Japanese. There was a lot of linguistic overlap at the time, which has since been lost. For example, Ogai uses the word 許多, which doesn't appear in Nelson's. But, if you've studied Mandarin, you recognize it immediately as "xuduo" (considerable amount). Just thought I'd throw that in the mix to encourage those Japanese majors who have taken the plunge into Chinese.
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