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Kanbun (漢文 'Han Chinese writing') is a system for writing Literary Chinese used in Japan from the Nara period until the 20th century. Much of Japanese literature was written in this style and it was the general writing style for official and intellectual works throughout the period. As a result, Sino-Japanese vocabulary makes up a large portion of the Japanese lexicon and much classical Chinese literature is accessible to Japanese readers in some resemblance of the original.
Kanbun is described by Jean-Noël Robert as a "perfectly frozen 'dead language language that was continuously used from the late Heian period (794–1185) until after World War II. Kanbun, otherwise known as Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese, had long since ceased to be a colloquial language in China. Yet all the oldest writing in Japan are in kanbun and predate any written documents in Japanese, although there is considerable debate if these Chinese texts contained traces of the Japanese vernacular. Taking into consideration all the texts written in both Japanese and Chinese, including monastic documents, as well as 'near-Chinese' ( hentai-kanbun) texts, the amount of Chinese writing in Japan may exceed what was written in Japanese. Despite the size, quality, and importance of kanbun writing, John Timothy Wixted notes that scholars have disregarded kanbun as an area of study until recent times and it is the least properly represented part of the Japanese canon.
Aside from Chinese writing, kanbun also refers to a genre of techniques for reading Chinese texts read like Japanese or for writing in a way similar to Chinese. Samuel Martin coined the term Sino-Xenic in 1953 to describe Chinese as written in Japan, Korea, and other foreign (hence -xenic) zones on China's periphery. Roy Andrew Miller notes that although Japanese kanbun conventions have Sino-Xenic parallels with other traditions for reading Literary Chinese like Korean hanmun and Vietnamese Hán Văn, only kanbun has survived to the present day.
In the Japanese kanbun reading tradition, the Chinese text is transformed through punctuation, analysis, and translation into classical Japanese. Through a limited canon of Japanese forms and syntactic structures treated as though they existed in alignment with vocabulary and structures of Classical Chinese, the kanbun text could be read in drastically different ways. At its most extreme, this type of reading could render the text so simplified that it could be understood through an elementary student's perspective. At its best, it could preserve a large body of Classical Chinese texts that would have otherwise been lost. Thus the kanbun could also be of great value for understanding early Chinese literature.
There were several linguistic hurdles involved in kanbun transformation. Chinese grammatical order is subject–verb–object (SVO) and uses particles similar to English prepositions whereas morphemes are typically one syllable in length and inflection plays no role in the grammar. Conversely, Japanese sentence order uses SOV with syntactic features, including positions such as grammar particles that appear the words and phrases to which they apply.
Four major problems faced when transforming kanbun are the word order, parsing which Chinese characters should be read together, deciding how to pronounce the characters, and finding suitable equivalents for Chinese function words.
A new development in kanbun studies is the Web-accessible database being developed by scholars at Nishogakusha University in Tokyo.
Kanbun implemented two particular types of kana. One was okurigana 'accompanying script', kana suffixes added to kanji stems to show their Japanese readings; the other was furigana 'brandishing script', smaller kana syllables written alongside kanji to indicate pronunciation. These were used primarily as reinforcements to writing in kanbun. Kanbun—as opposed to 'Wa writing', Japanese text with Japanese syntax and predominately kun'yomi readings—is divided into several types:
As Literary Chinese originally lacked punctuation, the kanbun tradition developed various conventional reading punctuation, diacritical, and syntactic markers.
Kaeriten grammatically transforms Literary Chinese into Japanese word order. Two are syntactic symbols, the | —linking mark that denotes phrases composed of more than one character, and the レ 'katakana re mark' denotes 'reverse marks'. The rest are kanji commonly used in numbering and ordering systems:
As an analogy for kanbun changing the word order from Chinese sentences with subject–verb–object (SVO) into Japanese subject–object–verb (SOV), John DeFrancis gives this example of using a literal English translation—another SVO language—of the opening of the Latin-language Commentarii de Bello Gallico.
DeFrancis adds, "A better analogy would be the reverse situation–Caesar rendering an English text in his native language and adding Latin case endings."
Two English textbooks for students of kanbun are An Introduction to Kambun by Sydney Crawcour, reviewed by Marian Ury in 1990, and An Introduction to Japanese Kanbun by Komai and Rohlich, reviewed by Andrew Markus in 1990 and Wixted in 1998.
Among the Chu, there was a man selling shields and spears. He praised the former saying, "My shields are so solid nothing can penetrate them". Then he would praise his spears saying, "My spears are so sharp that among all things there's nothing they can't penetrate". Somebody else said, "If somebody tried to penetrate your shields with your spears, what would happen?" The man could not respond.
The first sentence would read thus, using modern Standard Chinese pronunciation:
A fairly literal translation would be "among Chu people, there existed somebody who was selling shields and spears". All words can be literally translated into English, except for the final particle 者 'one who', 'somebody who', which works as nominalizer marking a verb phrase as certain kinds of . The original Chinese sentence is marked with five Japanese kaeriten as:
To interpret this, The レ 'reverse' mark indicates that the order of the adjacent characters, 與 and 矛, must be reversed:
The word 有 marked with 下 'bottom' is shifted after 者 marked by ue 上 'top':
Likewise, the word 鬻 marked with 二 'two' is shifted to after 與 marked by ichi 一 'one':
To represent this reading in numerical terms:
Following these kanbun instructions step by step transforms the sentence so it has the typical Japanese subject–object–verb argument order. The Sino-Japanese on'yomi readings and meanings are:
Next, Japanese function words and conjugations can be added with okurigana, and Japanese to ... to と...と 'and' can substitute Chinese 與 'and'. More specifically, the first と is treated as an additional function word, and the second, the reading of 與:
Lastly, kun'yomi readings for characters can be annotated with furigana. Normally furigana are only used for uncommon kanji or unusual readings. This sentence's only uncommon kanji is hisa(gu) 鬻ぐ 'sell', 'deal in', a literary character which is included in neither the kyōiku kanji nor the jōyō kanji lists. However, in kanbun texts it is relatively common to use a large amount of furigana—often there is an interest in recovering the readings used by people of the Heian or Nara periods, and since many kanji can be read either with on'yomi or kun'yomi pronunciations in a kanbun text, the furigana can show at least one editor's opinion of how it may have been read.
The completed kundoku translation reads as a well-formed Japanese sentence with kun'yomi:
This annotated kanbun translates to, "among Chu people, there existed one who was selling shields and spears".
is rendered as
The Unicode block for kanbun is U+3190..319F:
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