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

[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.