ひらがな新聞『まいにちひらがなしんぶんし』記事文の言語的特徴 - 語彙の量的調査を中心に -

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to clarify the characteristics of the Mainichi Hiragana Shinbunshi, published in 1873 as a newspaper written with only Hiragana. In previous research, it was pointed out that “hiragana newspapers certainly did not use Kanji, however, they still used words of Chinese origin”. The author surveyed the ratio of words of Japanese origin to foreign loanwords. As a result, words of Japanese origin accounted for approximately 80%, and it was confirmed that the articles were written mainly with words of Japanese origin. Even in the survey of the frequency of appearance of words, most of the words used at high frequency are words of Japanese origin. The author also discovered that in many cases they paraphrased the words from a word of Chinese origin into a word of Japanese origin when they gave a supplementary explanation about the difficult word. The results show the Mainichi hiragana shinbunshi emphasized the use of words of Japanese origin. In the survey of the part-of-speech ratio, the proportion of verbs and particle was similar to the proportion of popular newspapers that the previous study had shown. This property is different from that of stiff style like the kanbun-kundoku style.