OpenCourseWare Classical Japanese Grammar

Classical Japanese: A Grammatical Compendium is a reference guide to classical Japanese grammar intended to reach students who have already acquired a fair command of modern Japanese and a basic knowledge of modern Japanese grammar.

Making extensive use of reference works on literary-style Japanese or bungo 文語, the current text provides a concise introduction to the classical language through a compact linguistic analysis. It puts key grammatical features in context, using examples drawn from a range of classical sources. The used source material primarily represents well-known phrases or lines of poetry taken from masterpieces of the Japanese classical literary canon. As a reference work primarily dealing with lexical categories, this book should optimally be used in conjunction with other selected readings from classical texts. This handbook therefore tries to achieve the multiple goals of helping students to master the key points of the classical language, introducing real-language background derived from ancient, medieval, and early modern documents, and offering stimuli for further reading in the original and in translation.

This publication was made possible thanks to a generous ERC-StG project (acronym: JapanGreatDepression (reference number 240854).