At 11:07 AM 7/3/2001, Genenz wrote:
>I don't think Jindai-Moji
>("script of the period when Japan was
>created by the gods from heaven")
>can be treated as real scripts.
>
>It is very doubtful they really existed (in history).
>Actually, there is no proof they ever had been used
>except by some nationalist scholars (but even there not in
>actual, communicative use) in the Edo Period
>who tried to demonstrate
>the Japanese invented a script by themselves.
Evidently so.
>For some simple information on the jindai moji conf.
>http://www.alltheweb.com/go/1/H/www.mmtaylor.net/Literacy_Book/DOCS/Jindai_M
>oji.html
Not there. But try the Google cache of
http://www.interlog.com/~mmt/Literacy_Book/DOCS/Jindai_Moji.html
which shows a jindai moji obviously copied from Korean Hangul, and this
item from
http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/arthist/ahgsa/symposium00.htm
>Creating Traditions: Competing Excavations and the Political Uses of
>Invented Language
>Hans Bjarne Thomsen
>In 1819, the scholar Hirata Atsutane (1776-1843) published a controversial
>work that was to have wide impact on not just Kokugaku thought but also
>the language and arts of contemporary Japan. The book, the Jinji hifumi
>den, supposedly marked the discovery of Japanese alphabets, the so-called
>jindai moji, pre-dating the introduction of Chinese characters. According
>to Atsutane, the alphabets constitute the world’s first written language
>that had been handed down from the gods to the Japanese long before the
>arrival of the imports from the continent.
>Atsutane’s theory was to have wide repercussions as inscriptions in the
>new alphabets began to appear on the art and visual culture of the
>nineteenth century: in calligraphy, on stone inscriptions, in Shinto
>rituals, and even in the design of paper currency. Excavations also
>supposedly revealed ancient Japanese artifacts with jindai moji
>characters. Later in the Meiji and into the Showa, these "uniquely
>Japanese" characters were taken up by State Shinto and figured in the
>dialogue vis-à-vis the newly conquered territories: the inscribed objects
>dug up in Japan competed in a sense with the inscribed bronze vessels
>excavated in China. In 1953 Yamada Yoshio finally sets an end to the
>controversy by proving conclusively the characters to be later forgeries
>and the once popular topic disappeared almost entirely from scholarly
>discourse.
>This paper proposes to reexamine these invented alphabets and to postulate
>on their origins and function. It will be seen that they, rather than
>stemming from the gods, come from Japan’s neighbors to the west: while
>some are direct copies of the Korean alphabet created in the 1440’s,
>others stem from Chinese Ming and Qing dynasty studies of inscriptions
>found on excavated artifacts from earlier dynasties. The fundamental irony
>of the jindai moji remains that, although proclaimed by scholars and
>artists to be uniquely Japanese creations, they ultimately are as foreign
>to Japan as the Chinese characters that they supposedly predate.
The conclusion seems to be that jindai moji are historical fakes that
passed into real, if limited, use. Realler than Klingon, apparently. :-) So
the question is, do any historians want to create an electronic corpus for
study, and do they need Unicode character encoding to publish papers on it?
Does anybody else want to use it?
>---------------------------------------------------------------------
>Kay Genenz
>Universitaet Bonn
>Seminar fuer Orientalische Sprachen
>Nassestr. 2, D 5313 Bonn
>Tel. 0228-73 84 40/15 Fax 0228-73 84 01
>http://www.uni-bonn.de/sos
>---------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Thomas Chan" <thomas@atlas.datexx.com>
> > I'd like to ask about the encoding status of the Japanese "Jindai"
> > scripts, which are mentioned in older documents[1], and until a certain
> > point in time, versions of the Roadmap.
Edward Cherlin
Generalist
"A knot! Oh, do let me help to undo it."
Alice in Wonderland
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