A few questions about kanbun

Japanese Language Questions
1

I’ve been trying to get a grasp on japanese writing before wide kana acceptance/invention and it becoming what it is today, and I’m kind of failing. I have a few questions.
I know these are noob questions, but I legitimately tried doing my research and failed.

1- At what point in history kanbun stopped being exactly like classical chinese writing? From what I gather, that’s what it was supposed to be but it ended up morphing into more modern (and “Japanese-only”) forms of kanbun, right?

2- Were the kojiki and nihonshoki written in pure classical chinese? Did they get “reprints” (I guess it was all done by hand) in different forms of kanbun throughout the years?

3- When did the transition between kanbun and “japanese” (the thing we have today) happen? I guess they coexisted for a while before kanbun was dropped…?

4- Since kanbun is just kanji, can I read it if I just memorize the 5000 most common kanji’s meanings? : D (I know the answer is no, but why?)

2

I only have a passing interest so take the following with a grain of salt:

1- Probably from the beginning since it was supposed to emulate it rather that replace it.

2- Got nothing on that one.

3- Most of modern Japanese was codified after WWII.

4- The Wikipedia page has a good example of why. The main thing being that there are kanji that are pretty obscure and WK is in now way going to prepare you for that. :wink:

2 Likes
3

Great news! As I grew impatient, I made this same question on a community of reddit.com and got spectacular answers!

kanbun
kanbun1162×911 111 KB

Thank you all very much anyway. :lizard: :lizard: :+1:

6 Likes
4

This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.