This book has no exact predecessors, although indexes found in Mizushima (1996 (1972), 1984a, 2003) come close. However, Mizushima’s works, while being a wonderful example of Japanese philological approach, have their limitations, both in structural and scholarly sense. First of all, an index, even the best one, is not an equivalent of a dictionary, especially in the situation similar to Mizushima’s research where one has to consult two different indexes that sometimes are not very conveniently organized. Second, Mizushima’s work is limited to the Man’yōshū data. While the Man’yōshū Eastern Old Japanese data found in the books fourteen and twenty of this anthology occupy the lion’s portion of the Eastern Old Japanese corpus, there are also other Eastern Old Japanese texts: Hitachi province (
The presentation of the corpus itself follows the same model as Alexander Vovin’s edition and translation of the Man’yōshū, but with the following peculiarities: Western Old Japanese poems from the Man’yōshū books fourteen and twenty are not included; the romanization system is based on the one adopted in Alexander Vovin’s A Descriptive and Comparative Grammar of Western Old Japanese (vol. 1 and 2, 2nd edition, Brill 2020); the commentary to the Eastern Old Japanese in books fourteen and twenty is thoroughly revised as compared to their edition in Vovin (2012, 2013); the commentary to the Hitachi province poems, poems from the Man’yōshū book sixteen and a poem from the Kokin wakashū is much more detailed than in other translations to European languages; the translation of and the commentary to the Azuma asobi uta is done for the first time in the Western Japanology. There is another minor change: copulas n- and tǝ on one hand and a quotation verb tǝ on the other that were glossed before as DV (defective verb) are now glossed as COP (copula) or as QV (quotation verb). This change has not been implemented in Vovin 2020.1 and 2020.2, but will take place in this and all following publications.
The dictionary includes all words found in the Eastern Old Japanese poems, irrespective of the fact whether they are identical with their Western Old Japanese cognates or not. The simple motivation behind this approach is based on the fact that the Eastern Old Japanese texts are written in the Western Old Japanese orthography; therefore we are looking at the dim world of the Eastern Old Japanese phonology through the Western Old Japanese glass darkly, and an exclusion of similar looking words may result in throwing out a baby together with the tab water. We list all attestations of a given word in each of the texts constituting the Eastern Old Japanese corpus, but we do not provide any textual examples in the dictionary itself because these can be easily found in the corpus by using the information on attestations. We also provide etymological and/or comparative information in each dictionary entry with the main focus on Western Old Japanese and Ainu.
It is our hope that the present monograph will greatly facilitate the research not only on Eastern and Western Old Japanese in particular but also on the East Asian historical linguistics in general.
Alexander Vovin and Sambi Ishisaki-Vovin
Poligny, December 31, 2020