A Descriptive Grammar of Early Old Japanese Prose.

• Author: Miller, Roy Andrew
• Position: A Reference Grammar of Classical Japanese Prose - Book Review

A Descriptive Grammar of Early Old Japanese Prose. By JOHN R. BENTLEY. Brill's Japanese Studies Library, vol. 15. Leiden: BRILL, 2002. Pp. 286, tables. $68.

A Reference Grammar of Classical Japanese Prose. By ALEXANDER VOVIN. London: ROUTLEDGE CURZON, 2003. Pp. 476, tables. $135.

The problems with Bentley's book begin with his title. The texts with which he is concerned are in the main not prose, at least not in the usual understanding of that term; nor can the bulk of them be described as "Old Japanese," let alone "Early"; nor is what he has published a "descriptive grammar."

Bentley's text-corpus consists of his own selection of sixteen examples from the early Japanese religious-ceremonial texts known as Norito (a word of much disputed meaning to the understanding of which Bentley is able to contribute nothing). He refers to these throughout as "liturgies"; "intercessions" or "imprecations" would be more accurately descriptive of their content. They are intricate, lapidary literary concoctions, full of repetitions and limited in vocabulary. They preserve a number of pre- (or at least, non-) Buddhist religious terms, many now not well understood; they make generous use of poetic-stylistic devices that elsewhere may be observed in full flower in the Old Japanese poetic canon; and they are transmitted in a mixed Japanese-Chinese logogram-cum-phonogram orthography that overtly records only a minimum of their Japanese lexical items and morphological elements. For the bulk of the remainder we have only a late, often self-contradictory "reading tradition" that at best is thought to be no earlier than "early Kamakura," i.e., ca. 1200; the mixed-script texts themselves are no earlier than 927. For all these reasons, it is difficult to take Bentley's categorizations of his corpus as "early," "old," or "prose," at face value.

His claim to have written a "descriptive grammar" is equally without basis. Because of the extremely limited semantic range of his texts, he has felt it necessary to go to other examples of earlier Japanese in order to "flesh out" his description; as a result many of the morphological elements upon which he elaborates are actually absent from his corpus. Even more damaging to his claim is his penchant for introducing non-descriptive diachronic speculation, seeking to discover evidence for early Japanese forms and their meanings in words cited, too often incorrectly, from other languages. There is no mention of any hypothesis concerning a possible cognate relationship between Japanese and these other languages, or between Japanese and the language families to which these other languages may or may not belong; the forms are merely cited, and apparently that explains everything. Whatever this is, it is not descriptive grammar.

Particularly in view of the extremely recondite content of the Norito texts, establishing their meaning must be an essential first step in writing any grammatical description embracing them, whether synchronic ("descriptive") or diachronic, i.e., historical. They consist in the main of inordinately extended syntactic units in which it is not always a simple matter to establish anything resembling immediate constituents; they abound in embedded discourse, where it is frequently a theological fine-point to determine who is speaking to whom (gods to men, or men to gods?); and they have preserved more than one pious hapax of the "mumpsimus for sumpsimus" variety, for the original sense of which we now have only a tradition of free-wheeling guesses.

Bentley could have found much needed help in unraveling at least some of these semantic knots by consulting more often than he does the published Norito translations of Philippi (1952) and Bock (1979). Even more useful would have been the painstakingly literal versions by Satow and Florenz published in TASJ between 1878 and 1881, which he has not consulted at all; similarly he has overlooked such important contributions to our understanding of these texts as Dumoulin, MN 12 (1956): 121-56, 269-98, who demonstrates, inter alia, that not only what we take these texts to mean, but also in many important details the very texts themselves depend upon, and are no older than, the often widely diverging exegetical opinions of this or that Tokugawa hermeneute. Even at best, so much of the grammatical apparatus, particularly in the realms of morphological formants and case-grammar suffixes, that we find today in our editions of these...