A history of the Japanese language (review)

The late Samuel E. Martin’s monumental reference works (1987, 1988 [1975]) provide thorough answers to a wide variety of questions about the history of Japanese but do not present it in a chronological narrative. Takeuchi 1999 tries to do that, but rather unsatisfactorily; it is both too freighted and idiosyncratic. So are Bentley 2001 and Vovin 2003, 2004, 2008, which in any case do not deal with all stages of the language. Neither do recent essays on premodern grammar by scholars of literature such as McCullough (1988), Shirane (2005), and Wixted (2006). Though perhaps better than Sansom 1928, Henderson 1948, or Morris 1966, which they superseded, as linguistic studies they are no more adequate. Shibatani (1990) felicitously includes Ainu along with Japanese, but, like Tsujimura (2007), concentrates on modern phonological and syntactic theory, making short shrift of diachronic matters. Hence, when pressed for a general one-volume treatment in English of Japanese language history, one has had little choice for a generation but to fall back on Miller 1967, for all its shortcomings. The field therefore owes a great debt of gratitude to Bjarke Frellesvig for producing this comprehensive, well-organized, and eminently useful monograph. It not only does the job splendidly but also sweeps away cobwebs and introduces some fresh perspectives on the premodern language.

The list price is daunting, but there is an electronic version libraries can purchase, so I assigned the book in a graduate course last spring with a clear conscience. It is unburdened by excessive scholarly apparatus,¹ and, though many pages demand careful reading, it should be accessible to Japanese area specialists provided they are willing to familiarize themselves with some linguistic terminology and are not intimidated by snippets of the International Phonetic Alphabet. My students and I found only a few, small production errors.² The two brief chapters on Eastern dialects (151–54, 397–402) and scattered remarks on other dialects leave a number of questions unanswered,³ but remind readers not to forget dialectal diversification. The chapter on modern phonology (384–89) seems too brief,⁴ but is to some extent supplemented by a concluding chapter (403–12) on ‘westernization’.

Specific strengths of the book include F’s care in distinguishing historical sound changes from synchronic morphophonemic processes and his systematic explanation of how they interacted stage by stage. F gives Japanese inflectional morphology a new description (the familiar categories of Japanese school grammar are confined to pp. 114–18 and 344–50), and though one can quibble over nomenclature,⁵ his theory represents a major step forward. Some may take issue with analyses that challenge traditional claims (e.g. about the Old Japanese ‘modal past’ -(i)kyeri and adjective morphology, 72–76), but they are always insightful. F carefully points out the absence of attestations of certain predictable forms in critical paradigms and lexical strata at various stages, and suggests promising lines of internal reconstruction.

Also noteworthy are F’s efforts to clarify the complex ways in which Chinese has influenced Japanese speech and writing. He does this principally by introducing a distinction between Sino-Japanese (SJ), which ‘became established at the very end of the EMJ [Early Modern Japanese] period’ (279), and ‘Japano-Chinese’ (J-Ch): ‘SJ is a nativization of J-Ch, removing it from the realm of a foreign language and providing a nativized pronunciation norm of kanji, which derives from J-Ch, but which in contrast to J-Ch is in full conformity with Japanese phonology and can be used within Japanese’ (278). It seems, however, that F overreaches when, in discussing the kind of assimilation called renjō, he makes use of this distinction to argue that SJ words like sanmi ‘third rank’ < *san-wi do not, as commonly believed, imply EMJ /sam/ ‘three’ despite Middle Chinese *sam:

[R]ather than positing distinct syllable final /-m/ within the SJ sound system on the basis of a few examples like these, it seems more likely that forms such...