近代日本語の当て字について

Abstract

It is an undeniable fact that the vocabulary of ancient Japanese has been greatly influenced by Chinese. In particular, the vocabulary that appeared in the Chinese classics such as the Four Books and Five Classics was accepted as part of Japanese. As time passed, although ancient China's political influence on Japan weakened, its cultural influence never ceased, and Chinese classics remained an indispensable part of the basic education of Japanese aristocrats and other upper classes. The “Kango” used in Japan were mainly those that appeared in Chinese classics, and were vocabulary that became established from the Heian period. During the Song, Ming, and Qing dynasties in China, trade exchanges between Japan and China flourished. Despite the "isolation policy" in place during the Edo period, only Dutch and Chinese ships were allowed to trade, and Chinese “Baihua Fiction” were imported to Japan one after another through censorship. Written in a colloquial style similar to the spoken language, these “Baihua Fiction” had a great impact on Japan at the time. However, unlike the “Kango” in the Chinese classics, the kanji idioms in the “Baihua” vocabulary were not familiar to the Japanese people of the time, so they were often used as "ateji," phonetic equivalents. In the Meiji era, modernization progressed and Japanese language reform also advanced. Regarding vocabulary, new concepts flowed in from the West, so they had to create new words or translate them to fit these concepts. For example, the foreign word "tobacco" derived from Portuguese is written in the "ateji" of "煙草", and new words were created one after another. In this paper, I will explore the relationship between Ateji and "Baihua Fiction" from a historical perspective, and examine the "ateji" in the literary style novel " Ukigumo " from around Meiji 20 (1887) to see how much ｍodern Japanese was influenced by “Baihua Fiction”.