Talk:銀

Quotation from Kojiki

@Poketalker, Eirikr Is the quotation from Kojiki written in Classical Chinese or Old Japanese? Do we consider such sentences as Old Japanese? I know some quotations have Old Japanese words tucked within sentences written in Classical Chinese, but does this apply here? Are all the kanji found in Kojiki considered Old Japanese? KevinUp (talk) 17:52, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

• @KevinUp:

A lot of the Kojiki is written in 漢文 (kanbun), that odd Japan-specific lect of Classical Chinese. This style of writing was often read as 漢文訓読 (kanbun kundoku, literally “Chinese text, meaning reading”), where "meaning" referred to the practice of reading out the Japanese words that corresponded to the meaning of the written Chinese, including changing the order and grammar as required to result in a Japanese utterance.

One substantial challenge here is that many Japanese dictionaries and similar resources will quote ancient kanbun texts, based on the kundoku readings. But -- I can't find anywhere that clearly lays out when those readings were first recorded.

For shirokane, for instance, the KDJ entry here (scroll down for the しろがね reading) clearly shows a different version of that text:

※古事記（712）中「金(くがね)銀(しろかね)を本(はじめ)と為て目の炎耀(かがや)く種々の珍しき宝、多(さは)に其の国に在り」

Compared to the actual source manuscript as added by @Poketalker in the 銀 entry:

於是大后歸神言教覺詔者「西方有國、金銀爲本、目之炎耀種種珍寶多在其國。吾今歸賜其國。」

A slightly different version from over on the Chinese Wikisource:

於是大后歸神。言教覺詔者。西方有國。金銀爲本。目之炎耀。種種珍寶。多在其國。吾今歸賜其國。

It seems pretty clear that the KDJ's citation for しろかね is not actually backed up by anything confirmable in the text itself. We see the glyph 銀, but we really don't have any contemporaneous evidence explicitly traceable to the Kojiki or the 712 CE date that confirms the reading.

I had a quick look through the Man'yōshū for しろかね, and while I found one hit, it doesn't actually spell out the word しろかね -- it only uses the ideograph. So again, we have no confirmation that 銀 was actually read as anything like しろかね at that time. We can deduce that this was probably the reading, based on other evidence, but we don't have solid textual proof.

@KevinUp, thank you for bringing this up. My thinking about certain Japanese sources has been evolving as I've been digging around more in the ancient works I can find. My current position is that we (the JA entry editors in general) might want to eschew citing ideograph-only text instances in cases where phonetic evidence is needed. @KevinUp, Poketalker, Suzukaze-c, TAKASUGI Shinji, Dine2016, anyone else I've missed, what do you think? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 20:42, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

@Eirikr: Thanks for the reply. I think that kanbun text is unsuitable as a citation, because the word order, grammar, etc. does not conform with that of Japonic languages. Fortunately there's a quotation from Man'yōshū (Poketalker has added it to the entry), so the word is indeed attested in Old Japanese, though how the phonetic value is deduced from man'yōgana is a different matter. KevinUp (talk) 21:07, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

@KevinUp, a few thoughts:

• Kanbun texts are indeed non-ideal for our purposes. That said, while they cannot be used as evidence of a Japanese term's reading, I think they can be used as evidence of a Japanese term's spelling.
• The Man'yōshū example that Poketalker added at Old Japanese 銀 is the same one I linked above, MYS book 5, poem 803. As I noted above, that's the only poem using either the 銀 spelling or the しろかね reading. In this poem, the spelling 銀 is used ideographically, and the reading しろかね is not provided by the text at all -- that reading is based on later interpretation.
• Where used, man'yōgana spellings are (relatively) straightforward phonetic spellings. The phonetic values for man'yōgana are pretty well agreed upon, with few ambiguities (a small handful of man'yōgana characters have more than one phonetic value).

So we have two texts -- the Kojiki and the Man'yōshū -- from the Nara period, both of which confirm that the spelling 銀 was known and used, but neither of which provide any clear evidence of the reading しろかね. Strictly textually speaking, we don't yet know the earliest confirmable case of the reading しろかね. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 22:20, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

@Eirikr: I don't think kanbun can be used as evidence for a Japanese term's spelling, because it is not written in Japanese, but in a particular style of Classical Chinese. The text in kanbun shows that the scribes who wrote the text were aware of the existence and meaning of the ideograph, but it does not imply that the word is Japanese.

@Poketalker May I know where the transliteration "siro₁kane" is obtained from? Is it deduced from the modern spelling しろかね? KevinUp (talk) 22:54, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

The reading of the ancient text had been transmitted orally from generation to generation, and there is no written source to show the real pronunciation at the beginning. However, scholars are sure their reading is correct. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 01:36, 14 November 2019 (UTC)

I've begun reading Marc Hideo Miyake (2003) Old Japanese: A phonetic reconstruction, New York: RoutledgeCurzon, →ISBN and I found that various methods such as (1) internal reconstruction, (2) external reconstruction, and (3) reconstruction based upon written records were used to obtain the transliteration of Old Japanese. KevinUp (talk) 16:14, 14 November 2019 (UTC)