Man’yōgana 万葉仮名

Traditional Chinese scholarship saw orthographic structure in terms of the system of liùshū, explained as six principles of character formation. Of these, modern palaeographers have repeatedly called into question the category of semantic compounds (hùiyì), challenging its historical role in the development of the script. At the same time, while in general such misgivings may be well founded with regard to the formative stage of Chinese writing, it is also apparent that for people in medieval China the hùiyì principle was a perfectly viable way of understanding the orthography of existing characters and creating alternate forms. This is corroborated by numerous non-standard variants recorded in traditional dictionaries or some of the popular character forms (súzì) in the Dūnhuáng manuscripts. Many of these variant forms represent hùiyì-type combinations of two or more semantic components, and these are often folk-etymological rationalizations of the xíngshēng composition of standard characters, especially when the standard structure has lost its transparency. The aim of this paper is to look at medieval orthography synchronically and demonstrate that hùiyì forms were by no means uncommon among the non-standard forms of the manuscript tradition. In sum, hùiyì forms were an inherent feature of the writing system during this period, even if they are largely absent from standard orthography.

2011

Ideas behind symbols –languages behind scripts, 2019

In the 8th century, the Japanese used Chinese characters in order to write chronicles and poetry in the Japanese language. The earliest known works are 古事記 Kojiki “Records of Ancient Matters” (712 A.D.) and 万葉集Man’yôshû ”Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves” (759 A.D.). In comparison, the oldest known version of the Mongolian chronicle Manghol-un Niuča Tobča'an 元朝秘史 “Secret History of the Mongols” (13-14th c.) was also written in Chinese characters. The Chinese characters which were used to write Japanese and Mongolian have two features: sound and meaning, thus comprising phonetic and also semantic or symbolic aspects. In this paper I try to compare the usages of the Chinese characters between the Japanese and the Mongolian with their earliest language documents focusing on their symbolic aspects.

2003

University of Washington Press eBooks, 2019

Database of Medieval Chinese Texts, 2020

Notes on the collection of variant characters of the Zǔtáng jí 祖堂集 (K.1503) and the referencing system used for the Database of Medieval Chinese Texts (Ghent University & DILA 法鼓文理學院). Variants are collected from an original print of the Goryeo 高麗 edition of the ZTJ which is stored at the Library of the Institute for Research in Humanities 人文科学研究所図書室 of Kyōto University 京都大學, Japan.

Exploring Written Artefacts: Objects, Methods, and Concepts, 2021

This paper compares variant characters in large-scale dictionaries from the pre-modern period with actual writing habits using a special subset of variants known as 'semantic compounds' (huiyi 會意) as a case study. The results show that despite their prominent presence in traditional dictionaries, only a fraction of such variants were in everyday use. Most of the forms recorded in dictionaries were preserved and handed down as part of the lexicographic tradition, to some extent irrespective of genuine writing habits. Going one step beyond recognising that only some of the documented forms were at any given time in common use, the analysis presented here measures the discrepancy between dictionaries and manuscripts as a percentage.

Korea Journal, 2010

This paper discusses the role of the Lelang commandery in the process of introducing Chinese characters into Korea. In the Lelang commandery, native populations of non-Han origin would have been put into the "documentary administration," under situations similar to such frontier regions as Juyan and Dunhuang, in the process of which Chinese characters were most likely accepted on an extensive scale. The use of Chinese characters in the Lelang commandery was not limited to a group of Han people, as has been traditionally understood. Those Chinese characters introduced at that time would not necessarily have to be so-called genuine Chinese characters. Particular examples of Chinese characters that developed later into Korean idu are confirmed in official Qin and Han documents. The population native to the Lelang com-mandery maintained contact with various usages in the document-based administrative system for over 400 years and the usages suited to the linguistic behavior of the population on the Korean peninsula was naturally selected. It is to be noted that the process of introducing Chinese characters into Korea is best explained by the long-lasting linguistic contact and the resultant transformation .

Scripta, 2012

The common terms on and kun as applied to kanji readings in modern Japanese orthography lead to misunderstandings of how kanji were used in the critical earliest period of Japanese writing. We identify a class of early phonographic uses of kanji in which they were not forerunners of later kana, and explain how recognition of this class may be of importance for research on the relationship of Japan and the Korean peninsula in the mid 1 st millennium.

This is a study of a version of the Sino-Mongol glossary known as the Bei-lu Yi-yu 北虜譯語(also known as Yi-yu 譯語), which is contained in the Deng-tan Bi-jiu 登壇必究. The purpose of this paper is to explain the dialect sound system, and the spelling rules of the Chinese Characters denoting Mongolian sounds in the Bei-lu Yi-yu.