I was going to make something like this, but now I don't have to

2005-01-21

I was going to make something like this, but now I don't have to

万葉集検索, the "Manyoushuu search system", is a search front-end for the entire "Ten Thousand Leaf Collection" of Japanese poetry.

It even includes the freaky kanji 原文 ("original versions"), like

足日木乃山下響鳴鹿之事乏可母吾情都末

for what we now write

あしひきの山下響め鳴く鹿の言ともしかも我が心夫.

I'm so glad kana were eventually invented. Those old using-kanji-for-sound poems are like reading English in Alpha Bravo Charlie format.

(Ashihiki no (or ashibiki no) is one of my favourite old Japanese phrases, because even though it appears in scores of poems, no-one today knows for sure what it actually means. It's just a pillow-word that comes before 山, "mountain". My favourite theory is that it comes from 足引き and means something like "tiring to the legs", but the phonetic evidence is against me, I hear.)

Popularity factor: 2

Evelyn:

Hi Matt - can you explain the sentence? i am using the reading tutor that B-Blue suggested, http://language.tiu.ac.jp/tools_e.html but i still cannot make out what the sentence means even though i understand individual kanji's ...
Under the foot-drawing mountain, besides the words formed by sound from the deer and the one who has decided to be my husband? ... ???

Matt:

haha, actually that one's a bit beyond me too!

My best guess, with no attempt at retaining poeticness and wanton Old Englishifying of 心夫, is:

"I find the thought of you as moving as the call of the deer which makes the foot of the (ashihiki) mountains ring, oh heart-husband of mine."

But I really don't know enough about old uses of とも and しかも yet to say how correct this is. Still, if I was reading it in the original kanji I'd be completely lost ;)

2005-01-21