16 works of kana bungaku (‘literature written using the Japanese syllabary’) have been made public in the “Corpus of Historical Japanese Heian Period Series I: Kana literature”, and one part of the first volume of the early Heian Period-annotated kundokubun (Chinese text annotated for translation into Native Japanese) in the Saidai-ji copy of the Konkōmyōsaishōōkyō (a Chinese translation of the ‘Golden Light Sutra’) has been made public in the “Corpus of Historical Japanese Heian Period Series II: Kunten materials”.
All the texts in the Heian Period Series are based on the Shinpen Nihon Koten Bungaku Zenshū(Shogakukan Publishing), JapanKnowledge.
Please read before using.
We have established a link from the Corpus of Historical Japanese, Heian Period Series to the Shinpen Nihon Koten Bungaku Zenshū (Shogakukan) in JapanKnowledge.
From any entry in the list of examples in the search results from the online search application Chunagon, it is now possible to jump directly to the corresponding page in the Shinpen Nihon Koten Bungaku Zenshū in JapanKnowledge, which contains the source text, a Modern Japanese translation, and footnotes. Users can refer to translations and notes while they analyze Classical Japanese language through corpora.
Presentations of research results using the Corpus of Historical Japanese must include a citation taking the general form of the example below (with appropriate modifications depending on the version and the date of access):
* As long as one of either the version or the date of access is clearly cited, the other can be omitted, as below:
Users will need to access the Corpus of Historical Japanese through the online search engine Chunagon. Completion of a Users Licensing Agreement is required.
Please refer to the following: The Corpus of Historical Japanese: How to apply
* Titles are current with the time of development.
The corpus compilation was supported by the "Design for a Diachronic Corpus" (2009-2016) project and the "Construction of Diachronic Corpora and New Developments in Research on the History of Japanese" (2016-2022) project.
Kunten materials are Chinese classics and Buddhist scriptures, etc. that are written in kanbun (‘Classical Chinese writing’) but are also marked with symbols serving as kana glosses, as wokoto-ten (‘marks for grammatical function particles’), and as kaeri-ten (‘marks for transposition’), etc., which indicate the way those texts are to be “read out in” (or “translated into”) the Japanese language. Kunten materials employ lexical items and grammatical constructions differing from those used in kana literature, and thus are crucial materials for learning more about diversity in the Japanese language in the relevant historical period.
In the “Heian Period Series II: Kunten materials” corpus is collected a work that is considered particularly important among the kunten materials of the early Heian Period: the first volume of the early Heian Period-annotated kundokubun in the Saidai-ji copy of the Konkōmyōsaishōōkyō (a Chinese translation of the ‘Golden Light Sutra’). This material preserves the form of the Japanese language in the first half of the ninth century, a time period for which there are not many materials remaining in existence, and thus it is a crucial resource capturing traces of the ascent and decline of Old Japanese as well as developments in the Japanese language subsequent to ancient times.
The corpus 西大寺本『金光明最勝王経』平安初期点 (Saidaiji-hon “Konkōmyōsaishōōkyō” Heian shoki-ten ‘Early Heian Period-annotated Saidai-ji copy of a Chinese translation of the “Golden Light Sutra”) takes as its main text an original kundokubun ‘Classical Chinese to Japanese translation’ generated by the present project. In the process of generating the text, reference was made to the following resources:
In principle, the present corpus takes as its main text a kundokubun derived from all of the kanbun text in Volume I of the Saidai-ji-hon Konkōmyōsaishōōkyō, along with the early Heian Period-annotated kunten added thereto. However, the following textual elements were excluded from the coverage of the kundoku ‘translation’ process:
In addition, out of the kundokubun thus generated, the following elements were excluded from the coverage of the corpus:
Please read before using.
Please consult the Annotation Guidelines before use.
Presentations of research results using this corpus must include a citation taking the general form of the example below (with appropriate modifications depending on the version and the date of access):
* As long as one of either the version or the date of access is clearly cited, the other can be omitted, as below:
Users will need to access the Corpus of Historical Japanese through the online search engine Chunagon. Completion of a Users Licensing Agreement is required.
Please refer to the following: The Corpus of Historical Japanese: How to apply
* Titles are current with the time of development.
The corpus compilation was supported by the "Construction of Diachronic Corpora and New Developments in Research on the History of Japanese" (2016-2022) project, JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 18H00674 (2015-2019), and "Refining the Corpus of Historical Japanese with Information on Notation and Bibliographical Form" (2016-2022) project.
In addition to the present corpus, other data resources for Volume I of the early Heian Period-annotated Saidai-ji copy of the Konkōmyōsaishōōkyō are available, listed below. Please refer to the following: