Kokinshu #106

[lnhammer]

(Topic unknown.)

    Listen, bush warbler --
call out your reproaches
    at the blowing wind.
Has my hand even so much
as brushed against these flowers?

—26-29 June 2011

(Original author unknown.) Feel free to replace "listen" with an attention-getting exclamation appropriate for your local dialect -- so "yo" or "oy" for New Yorkers, "hwæt" for Anglo-Saxons, and so on. And may I just say that I like how in Japanese the question marker can go after what's being questioned instead of always at the end of the sentence -- here the "I" of part of "my" is marked as a rhetorical question. My translations obscure that this begins with the blowing winds that end the previous poem.


fuku kaze o
nakite uramiyo
uguisu wa
ware ya wa hana ni
te dani furetaru

---L.

Comments

[pameladlloyd]

It's very interesting to see the possibilities inherent in different languages, and the conundrums this may cause translators. Not to mention ESL students. Learning to use a language that has parts of speech that aren't present in your own, or figuring out how to translate the subtleties of nuance inherent in a language, when the destination language doesn't offer similar nuances, is not easy.

[lnhammer]

Or even, figuring out the nuances ...

[pameladlloyd]

Heh. :-)

[(Anonymous)]

"And may I just say that I like how in Japanese the question marker can go after what's being questioned instead of always at the end of the sentence" -- sadly, they yanked that feature a couple versions ago. Japanese language change is the Steve Jobs of... er... language change.

Seriously, where the question particles go is one of the things that makes classical Japanese really different and interesting from modern Japanese. Total agreement with you there. --Matt

[lnhammer]

Er, yeah. Meant to include a "classical" in that sentence. At least they also kept the feature that a question word is enough to make a question, without requiring a marker.

(Any idea when ka moved to only the end of the sentence? I get the impression it's that way by Edo period, but that's only a vague impression.

---L.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm still shamefully fuzzy on all those medieval details, but without looking it up properly I would guess 1200-1500ish, as part of a bunch of interrelated changes involving the decline of the kakari-musubi system, merger of 連体形 with 連用形, etc.

[lnhammer]

Ah -- phased out with kakari-musubi makes sense, since there's a kakari-musubi usage of ka. Duh.

Tho', were the verb mergers part of the same thing? I'd the impression that was a separate streamlining of the rules, possibly occurring out of phase with de-kakari-musubi-ing.

(Geh. Words. Our rainy season arrived this week, and my brain is a mush of humidity.)

---L.

[(Anonymous)]

You could be right! I could be misremembering and/or have read something that was itself incorrect. At some point it started to make sense to me that a weakened kakari-musubi system would mean a weakened distinction between renyo vs rentai, and vice versa, and that's what I remember now. Hmm..

[lnhammer]

Hmm -- I'd think it'd weaken the distinction between all the verb forms caught up in kakari-musubi. But I've nothing to support that thought.

From Shirane's textbook, the impression I got is that RTK became the sentence-final form because the nominalizer this implied acted as a sort of emphatic way of speaking -- as if everyone was sticking a ghost のだ on everything. Which sounds really silly when put that way.

---L.