日本語の文字種と書物の関係について －写本の時代から版本の時代まで－

Abstract

Originally lacking an alphabet of its own, Japan made use of abbreviated or cursive Chinese characters to create katakana and hiragana, which stripped a character’s original semantic meaning to act as pure phonograms. Eventually Japanese came to be written using a combination of these three types of characters. The books in which these characters were written down also made use of binding methods imported from China, five types of which were used in parallel in Japan. Three of these binding methods were particularly common, and there was a status hierarchy among them, with a correlation between the contents of the work and the type of binding used. If we turn to examine the relationship between binding method and orthography, there is a clear tendency for scroll-format manuscripts to use lined paper for Chinese-character texts, but not for hiragana texts. A corresponding tendency can be found in codex-format printed books, which make use of a frame around the page for Chinese-character texts, but not in the earliest commercially-printed hiragana texts. This seems to be because while the frame used in Chinese-character texts serve to demonstrate the text is printed, hiragana printed books eliminated these in order to reproduce a manuscript format. Though some continuity remains, there is a difference in the respective attitudes displayed by manuscript and printed books towards the presence of lineation around the text. Thus, it is clear that in Japan the physical construction of the book held an intimate relationship, not just with the genre of writing it contained, but with its orthography as well.