How old does something have to be before it becomes unintelligible to the average native? A couple hundred years? A couple thousand years? For example could a native read Tales Of Genji?

kameden Wrote:How old does something have to be before it becomes unintelligible to the average native? A couple hundred years? A couple thousand years? For example could a native read Tales Of Genji?

This depends on the language, of course. For Japanese, the old literary style was used for a long time so that modern Japanese people basically can't read anything prior to about 1900 without special study.

Some old material is more difficult than others, of course -- the Tale of Genji is particularly difficult not only because it uses old Japanese but because the style is very difficult.

A commenter here recently related a story about the difficulty in reading technical documents from WW2 (relating to a Zero fighter plane), because of the use of now obsolete kanji for specialised terms.

I would be interested in finding out more about that, but I can't even find the original post now. Seems google doesn't index this site very well

Yeah, there are a lot of "pre-war" kanji that didn't survive the war. After the war, reformers finally got to replace/remove a lot of old/archaic kanji and they streamlined the system a bit. (That's where the Joyo Kanji comes from.) Some of those old kanji still remain in proper names of people and places.

Also, a lot of pre-war posters, newspapers, etc., write horizontal text from R -> L. So posters and such look "backwards" to modern Japanese readers (and everyone else.)

?huh, daer ot drah fo dniK !hsilgnE ni eb dlouw ti woh enigami tsuJ

That's a fairly minor concern, all things considered -- learning to read old forms of kanji is relatively easy because a lot of them look like the new forms. The difficulty of the old 文語 style is much more of a factor in the difficulty than the orthography, although orthography does become more of a concern when you get back into the Edo-period woodblock era.

How was the orthography different? I'm not really sure what that means actually, particularly in the context of Japanese...

tashippy Wrote:How was the orthography different? I'm not really sure what that means actually, particularly in the context of Japanese...

Sorry, I didn't see this post earlier. There were two main differences in pre-World War II writing. The first is the old kanji forms (like 應 or 覺). The second is old kana spelling, like けふ for modern きょう, いふ for modern いう, or えふ for modern よう.

Now when you get back to pre-Meiji texts then you're dealing with hentaigana and kuzushiji (cursive writing), which is a whole different kettle of fish.

It seems that most(?) high school students do a fair amount of classical Japanese study though.

tashippy Wrote:How was the orthography different? I'm not really sure what that means actually, particularly in the context of Japanese...

If you're curious about this topic, take a look at this book, published in 1899, intended for non-Japanese speakers looking to learn how to read and write Japanese:

http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Introduc...g+japanese

I bought a copy just for fun, to flip through when I want to kill a few hours. It's interesting. There's examples of telegrams, advertisements, etc. There are tables of hiragana and katakana, and around 2,500 kanji are introduced, along with reading exercises and grammatical notes.

Also some examples of this weird thing apparently Japanese people used to do "back in the day": take extracts of Chinese writing and read them out loud, but orally rearranging the kanji into the "correct" Japanese order. Whatever turns you on I guess.

But I recommend this book just for fun.

john555 Wrote:Also some examples of this weird thing apparently Japanese people used to do "back in the day": take extracts of Chinese writing and read them out loud, but orally rearranging the kanji into the "correct" Japanese order. Whatever turns you on I guess.

There are Chinese texts that are numbered to be read in an order that Japanese people understand, with notes... It was explained and shown to me a long time ago by a teacher I was working with, so I don't remember so well. But I think this is still done to some extent, if we are indeed talking about the same thing.

Aikynaro Wrote:It seems that most(?) high school students do a fair amount of classical Japanese study though.

They do some, but not enough to actually develop a true reading proficiency in classical Japanese.

What john555 is talking about is still done; anyone who reads the Chinese classics in Japan does so through what's called 漢文訓読, which does involve giving the characters sino-Japanese or actual Japanese readings and rearranging the characters. This wasn't just a random pastime or a parlor trick, but the way the very influential Chinese classics, and all the literature written in Chinese by Japanese people, were read. Japanese people still study this in school today. I'm actually very grateful that they did this because it means that if you know classical Japanese, you can basically read a great deal of classical Chinese as well with just a little bit of extra study.

yudantaiteki Wrote:

Aikynaro Wrote:It seems that most(?) high school students do a fair amount of classical Japanese study though.

They do some, but not enough to actually develop a true reading proficiency in classical Japanese.

What john555 is talking about is still done; anyone who reads the Chinese classics in Japan does so through what's called 漢文訓読, which does involve giving the characters sino-Japanese or actual Japanese readings and rearranging the characters. This wasn't just a random pastime or a parlor trick, but the way the very influential Chinese classics, and all the literature written in Chinese by Japanese people, were read. Japanese people still study this in school today. I'm actually very grateful that they did this because it means that if you know classical Japanese, you can basically read a great deal of classical Chinese as well with just a little bit of extra study.

Here's what it says in my "Practical Introduction to Japanese Writing" (published 1899; revised 1905):

http://i698.photobucket.com/albums/vv346...estyle.jpg

That's an accurate description. It was somewhat more useful in Chamberlain's day than it is now, but Japanese still study it in school, and it's still important for some pre-modern literature. I have to read kanbun like that all the time in my own research.

I was in a WWII museum with some Japanese people recently and most young peoples reading ability (and mine too) seems to end at WWII newspapers.

For some reason they kept writing newspapers in bungo when other literature was written in normal vernacular Japanese instead.