Deciphering Archaic Texts Full of Katakana

Japanese schoolkids can be envious of European ones when it comes to one thing. Instead of learning only 26 (30 in German) letters of the alphabet, they need to learn three different sets of characters.

First they learn Hiragana ひらがな and then Katakana カタカナ, phonetic syllabaries, each consisting of a 50-character set. Then they move on to more complicated Kanji 漢字 (= Chinese characters), i.e. an endless number of pictographs.

The use of Katakana is limited to words of foreign origin  (外来語). All kids learn this at school.

Well, this lesson is true as far as modern Japanese writing goes.
But before the Second World War, Katanaka was much more common. Namely, all official documents or legal texts were written in Kanji and Katakana.

Just take a look at the first modern Constitution of Japan (known as the Meiji Constitution / 大日本帝国憲法) which was valid from 1989 all the way up to 1947 (see the image above).

In other words, it has been less than a century since Hiragana, now taken for granted in offices and authorities, gained such widespread use in Japanese officialdom.

I confess that it takes a lot of effort for me to read the mixture of Kanji and Katakana (漢字カタカナ交じり文) in old scripts. When doing so, I miss Hiragana with its curved shape which stands in visual contrast to angular Kanji and makes every sentence structure clear.
 
Why am I writing this?

Recently, I had the chance to translate an official article dating back to 1937 (!).  It was a hard nut to crack. I had to fight my way through line by line. I painstakingly looked up old forms of Kanji (旧字体) which are no longer in use and the meanings of numerous Chinese-style set phrases (漢文調).

When I was done with the translation, I was enormously proud of myself for having been able to decipher such an archaic text.

While struggling with the original text, I came to remember early works written by Ogai Mori (#森鷗外). Reading his novels in a somehow strenuous pseudoarchaic style (#雅文体) was not for nothing, after all.

As the Japanese proverb says: “What one likes, one will do well.”

好キコソ物ノ上手ナレ

#translation #japanese #history #literature #writingsystem