15세기 일본의 천자문 학습-東京大學 國語硏究室 소장『註千字文』을 대상으로-

Abstract

Chūsenjimon(特22D55L46820, hereafter called Toudaibon) possessed by theoffice of the Japanese language in the University of Tokyo is considered to be writtenand glossed in the Bunmei era(1469-1497). This paper examines Kundoku(the Japanese reading of Classical Chinese) ofToudaibon in the 15th century. In Japan, the Thousand-Character classic is generallyconsidered tohave been read using the so-called Monzenyomi,in which the fourcharacters (represented by ABCD) comprising a phrase are read according to thefollowing pattern: <AB ondoku(reading of Chinese characters using theSino-Japanese pronunciation) - AB kundoku(reading of Chinese characters using theJapanese words corresponding to the meaning of each character) - CD ondoku - CDkundoku>. According to my counting, however, only 168 of overall 250 phrases(appoximately 67%) were read using Monzenyomi, whereas 82 phrases were readusing a Kundoku style different from Monzenyomi. The reading styles of phrases of Toudaibon can be classified into 6 types,including Monzenyomi. The reasons there exist as many as 6 styles of reading includepersonal decisions of the writer/glosser of Toudaibon, as well as the differences interms of the grammatical structure among Classical Chinese sentences in this book. The fact that Japanese intellectuals studied the Thousand-Character classic usingKundoku, means that they referred to the annotations about this book, understoodthe contents of this text, and put marks on it. This method of learning is very differentfrom that of Koreans, who learned this book using the following style of reading:「하늘(sky) 천(the Sino-Korean pronunciation of the first character), 따(earth) 지(the Sino-Korean pronunciation of the second character), etc」. It also means that,in Japan, this book was considered to be not only a textbook for learning Chinesecharaters, but the text of this book itself was also an object of learning. On the basis of this study, I hope to study the change in the Kundoku style ofthe Thousand-Character Classic in Japan.