Japanese Kanbun Reading

Kanbun kundoku (漢文訓読 "kanbun reading-by-meaning") is the Japanese pedagogical reading tradition for Classical Chinese (Literary Chinese / lzh) texts, mapping Sinitic word order onto Japanese morphology via three annotational devices: kaeriten (返り点) marks that re-sequence Chinese words into Japanese SOV order, okurigana (送り仮名) hiragana that supply Japanese inflection, and okototen (ヲコト点) that originally encoded Japanese particles. A genuine hybrid — the source text is Classical Chinese, but the rendered reading is in (classical) Japanese morphology and is parsed as Japanese. Distinct from any single stage of Japanese (ojp/ja_heian/ja_chu/ja_edo/ja) and from any actual Chinese reading tradition (zh_han/zh_tang/zh_song). Institutionalized at the Tokugawa Yushima Seidō (湯島聖堂) Confucian academy and continuously taught in Japanese secondary education ever since — the conduit through which Confucian classics, Buddhist canon, and Tang/Song poetry entered Japanese intellectual life from the 8th century to the present.

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