Old Japanese in the "Man'yousyuu", books one and two: Grammar, translations, and analytical concordance
I created a comprehensive analytic concordance of the first two books of the Man'yousyuu, an Old Japanese anthology of poetry. In addition, I transcribed all 234 poems in the corpus using a transcription system which faithfully and consistently indicates consonant and vowel distinctions reflected in the orthography, and likewise shows where these are not so reflected. The poems were also translated into English. Using the concordance as a database of linguistic forms, I wrote a short grammatical sketch of Old Japanese, including discussions of historical phonology, inflection, and syntax, and furthermore, I briefly explored a few selected topics of relevance to Old Japanese textual study, including discussions of clause types, genitive constructions, emphatic particles, and tense and aspect suffixes. A primary goal of the project was the creation of a good introductory primer to some of the earliest Old Japanese poetry encountered in the Man'yousyuu.
Ancient languages, Linguistics, Asian literature
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations