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is a method of annotating Classical Chinese so that it can be read in Japanese that was used from the Heian period to the mid-20th century. Much 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 lexicon of Japanese, and much classical Chinese literature is accessible to Japanese readers in some semblance of the original. The corresponding system in Korean is ''gugyeol'' (口訣). ==History== The Japanese writing system originated through adoption and adaptation of Written Chinese. Japan's oldest books (e.g., e.g. Nihon Shoki'') and dictionaries (e.g., ''Tenrei Banshō Meigi'' and ''Wamyō Ruijushō'') were written in ''kanbun''. Other Japanese literary genres have parallels; the ''Kaifūsō'' is the oldest collection of "Chinese poetry composed by Japanese poets". Burton Watson's (1975, 1976) English translations of ''kanbun'' compositions provide a good introduction to this literary field. 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.〔A Descriptive Grammar of Early Old Japanese Prose - Page 39 John R. Bentley - 2001 "Martin coined the term 'Sino-Xenic' as a label for Sino-X (Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean, Sino-Vietnamese and so on)."〕 Roy Andrew Miller notes that although Japanese ''kanbun'' conventions have Sinoxenic parallels with other traditions for reading Classical Chinese like Korean ''hanmun'' () and Vietnamese ''Hán Văn'' (), only ''kanbun'' has survived into the present day. He explains how in the Japanese ''kanbun'' reading tradition a Chinese text is simultaneously punctuated, analyzed, and translated into classical Japanese. It operates according to a limited canon of Japanese forms and syntactic structures which are treated as existing in a one-to-one alignment with the vocabulary and structures of classical Chinese. At its worst, this system for reading Chinese as if it were Japanese became a kind of lazy schoolboy's trot to a classical text; at its best, it has preserved the analysis and interpretation of large body of literary Chinese texts which would otherwise have been completely lost; hence, the ''kanbun'' tradition can often be of great value for an understanding of early Chinese literature. (1967:31) William C. Hannas points out the linguistic hurdles involved in ''kanbun'' transformation. ''Kambun'', literally "Chinese writing," refers to a genre of techniques for making Chinese texts read like Japanese, or for writing in a way imitative of Chinese. For a Japanese, neither of these tasks could be accomplished easily because of the two languages' different structures. As I have mentioned, Chinese is an isolating language. Its grammatical relations are identified in subject–verb–object (SVO) order and through the use of particles similar to English prepositions. Inflection plays no role in the grammar. Morphemes are typically one syllable in length and combine to form words without modification to their phonetic structures (tone excepted). Conversely, the basic structure of a transitive Japanese sentence is SOV, with the usual syntactic features associated with languages of this typology, including ''post'' positions, that is, grammar particles that appear ''after'' the words and phrases to which they apply. (1997:32) He lists four major Japanese problems: word order, parsing which Chinese characters should be read together, deciding how to pronounce the characters, and finding suitable equivalents for Chinese function words. According to John Timothy Wixted, scholars have disregarded ''kanbun''. In terms of its size, often its quality, and certainly its importance both at the time it was written and cumulatively in the cultural tradition, ''kanbun'' is arguably the biggest and most important area of Japanese literary study that has been ignored in recent times, and the one least properly represented as part of the canon. (1998:23) A promising new development in ''kanbun'' studies is the Web-accessible database being developed by scholars at Nishōgakusha University in Tokyo (see Kamichi and Machi 2006). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「kanbun」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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