Kokinshu #229

[lnhammer]

Topic unknown.

    If I were to lodge
in a meadow of many
    maidenflowers,
won't I, and for no reason,
get a rep for fickleness?

—5 April 2012

Original by Ono no Yoshiki, a grandson of Ono no Takamura (see #335). His birth date is unknown, but he appears in court records as a rising young courtier, including an inherited office as an imperial scribe, between 887 and his apparently early death in 902. He has two poems in the Kokinshu. ¶ Placed by the editors as a somewhat frivolous response to the previous. More grammar confusion: why is it ôkaru instead of ôki? I thought the -kari forms were used only with auxiliaries.


ominaeshi
ôkaru nobe ni
yadoriseba
ayanaku ada no
na o ya tachinamu

---L.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Seems safest to interpret it as a non-lexicalized version of the form, i.e. it really does mean "ooku aru" - "field [where] *there are* many maidenflowers". Which I guess makes whether just "ominaheshi ooki nobe" would be grammatical or not the interesting question. (I have no idea!) --Matt

[lnhammer]

.... head hurt now.

---L.

[(Anonymous)]

That second-last sentence was horrible, wasn't it? Sorry. Basically, I'm wondering if just plain "ominaheshi ooki nobe" would have been unacceptable, and the options were "ominaheshi no ooki nobe" (explicit subject marking, but metrically unacceptable) or "ominaheshi ookaru nobe" (syntactic expansion somehow rendering explicit subject marking unnecessary, metrically okay).

But, that theory only makes sense of "ominaheshi ooki nobe" is, in fact, grammatically unacceptable or "blocked"... and I have no idea if that's the case or not! --Matt

[lnhammer]

I *think* it's acceptable, even if not explicitly grammatical, especially in verse -- there's enough other subjects sans marker, even when not next to the verb, just in the KKS. But I'm no more certain of that than you.

---L.