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  • A History of the Japanese Language by Bjarke Frellesvig
  • Wesley M. Jacobsen (bio)
A History of the Japanese Language. By Bjarke Frellesvig. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010. xxiv, 436 pages. $151.00, cloth; $58.00, paper; $46.00, E-book.

The lack of a comprehensive yet accessible history of the Japanese language in English has long stood as a detriment to those engaged in research and education in Japanese linguistics and Japan studies at large. It has, first, allowed to go unchecked a tendency for historical research on Japanese to be pursued independently within narrowly circumscribed topics and historical [End Page 225] periods without a common reference point encouraging a cross-fertilization of ideas, making it difficult to assess the degree of progress of the field as a whole. For educators, it has created practical obstacles to securing appropriate curricular materials for introductory courses on the history of the language and has left nonspecialists in related disciplines of Japan studies such as history and literature without an appropriate resource for educating themselves on the many ways in which linguistics can inform their own interests in the Japanese language and its history. Bjarke Frellesvig’s A History of the Japanese Language (hereafter HJL) is a groundbreaking work that at one stroke dramatically changes this picture, opening up inestimable potential benefits both for advancing scholarship in the field of Japanese historical linguistics and for making that field accessible to a broader readership than has ever before been possible.

HJL will for many be seen as filling the gap left when Samuel Martin’s classic The Japanese Language through Time (Yale University Press, 1987; hereafter JLT), long the standard reference work in English on the history of the Japanese language, went out of print. Both works are comprehensive in scope and represent the state of the art of the field of Japanese historical linguistics at their respective times of publication, but there are substantial differences between the two in content and presentation that go well beyond a cataloging of advances in the field in the interim. First and most salient of these differences is the much more user-friendly format adopted by HJL. Martin’s volume is organized around linguistic topics such as syllable structure, voicing, and accent, and over a third of its 961 pages is devoted to extensive lists of nouns, verbs, and adjectives annotated item by item with historical details, giving an encyclopedic flavor to the work as a whole. HJL, by contrast, is organized by historical period, with sections progressing chronologically from Old Japanese (OJ) 700–800 to Early Middle Japanese (EMJ) 800–1200, Late Middle Japanese (LMJ) 1200–1600, and Modern Japanese (NJ for “new Japanese”) 1600–present. Chapters within each section are topically arranged, with chapters on phonology (sound structure) and grammar forming the core, prefaced by short chapters describing the written data sources for each period and supplemented, for certain periods, by chapters on the writing system and influences on Japanese from other languages, such as Chinese in EMJ and the Western languages in NJ. The overall format enables the reader to grasp much more directly and intuitively the flow of change in the language from period to period than does Martin’s work, and HJL is written for the most part in eminently readable prose that makes a comprehensive reading of the work from beginning to end, or of any individual chapter in it, a reasonable and more satisfying endeavor even for nonspecialists.

HJL is squarely focused on the history of the Japanese language as traceable through written documents and, unlike JLT, pays only scant attention [End Page 226] to data sources other than written texts that are standardly relied on by linguists for reconstructing stages of the language that may far predate written texts, such as comparative evidence from dialects internal to the Japanese archipelago, including Ryukyuan, and possible comparative evidence from languages other than Japanese, such as Korean. A discussion of the prehistory of the language is limited in HJL to a brief description of the sound inventory of proto-Japanese that serves as a background to the OJ period, based primarily on working back from written data from OJ itself...

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