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larryhammer ... when two strong men stand face to face, tho' they come from the ends of the earth.
One thing about textbooks of classical Japanese is that instead of making up their examples, they take sentences from the voluminous public-domain corpus, thus making the people who inhabit them doubly foreign* but not from some alternate reality. This does not reduce the amusement factor, however, as the corpus includes Heike Monogatari, the home of such snippets as Shinaba issho de shinan ("If we are going to die, let us die in one place") and Yoritomo ga kubi o hanete, waga haka no mae ni kakubeshi ("Cut off Yoritomo's head and hang it in front of my grave") and Yoroi yokereba urakakazu ("Because the armor was good, it did not pierce through to the back").
<pauses to admire a language that has a verb meaning "to pierce through to the back">
Now if they'd only used sentences like these in, say, my 8th grade Spanish textbook ...
Another bonus to using real examples: sometimes you get explications of thorny sentences from things you're trying to learn how to read.**
* The past being a foreign country, the past of a foreign country is doubly foreign.
** Not Heike, in this case, but the easier*** Kokinshu.
*** The language of poetry may be compressed, but it (almost) completely lacks honorific forms, which were even more complicated a thousand years ago. This is very much FTW here.
---L.
One thing about textbooks of classical Japanese is that instead of making up their examples, they take sentences from the voluminous public-domain corpus, thus making the people who inhabit them doubly foreign* but not from some alternate reality. This does not reduce the amusement factor, however, as the corpus includes Heike Monogatari, the home of such snippets as Shinaba issho de shinan ("If we are going to die, let us die in one place") and Yoritomo ga kubi o hanete, waga haka no mae ni kakubeshi ("Cut off Yoritomo's head and hang it in front of my grave") and Yoroi yokereba urakakazu ("Because the armor was good, it did not pierce through to the back").
<pauses to admire a language that has a verb meaning "to pierce through to the back">
Now if they'd only used sentences like these in, say, my 8th grade Spanish textbook ...
Another bonus to using real examples: sometimes you get explications of thorny sentences from things you're trying to learn how to read.**
* The past being a foreign country, the past of a foreign country is doubly foreign.
** Not Heike, in this case, but the easier*** Kokinshu.
*** The language of poetry may be compressed, but it (almost) completely lacks honorific forms, which were even more complicated a thousand years ago. This is very much FTW here.
---L.
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no subject
Date: 3 January 2011 05:26 pm (UTC)I do love the compression that's possible with all the verb forms.
no subject
Date: 3 January 2011 06:19 pm (UTC)我が is indeed a survival of が as possessive. That was the original use, and in the Kokinshu era that was still its most common function. が only gradually became a subject marker (の was more commonly used for that, in both main and relative clauses, when the subject was even marked at all -- often not the case, even in prose) and a conjunction,* but it wasn't until the Kamakura period and later that those other functions became standard. Took me a while to straighten all that out in my head, to my confusion.
* ETA: Not to mention also nominalizer, like modern の.
---L.
no subject
Date: 3 January 2011 07:17 pm (UTC)That is extremely cool.
no subject
Date: 3 January 2011 08:32 pm (UTC)You should go read my Heike posts:
http://lnhammer.livejournal.com/115702.html
http://lnhammer.livejournal.com/116041.html
http://lnhammer.livejournal.com/116414.html
---L.