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Strange tales and labiovelar transcriptions

Language Log 2022-03-22

East Asians have been addicted to strange stories for millennia.  Many of these fall under the rubric of guài 怪 ("strange"), e.g., zhìguài 志怪 ("records of anomalies"), the name of one of the earliest genres of strange stories in China.

One of the strangest aspects about East Asian strange tales is that perhaps the most famous collection of all was written by a Westerner, Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904).

As Bob Ramsey relates:

If ever there was a colorful character in Meiji Japan, it was Lafcadio Hearn.

In 1896 Hearn became a legal Japanese citizen (the first Westerner ever to do so), then renamed himself Koizumi Yakumo. He became a Buddhist.

But even before going completely “bamboo” (as old Asia hands would put it), Hearn had led a dizzyingly complex and unusual life. A Greek-Irish writer, he was rootless and impoverished before ending up in America, but once there he found work at a Cincinnati newspaper and started writing lurid accounts of local murders. These stories brought him fame, money—and notoriety. Adding to his scandalous reputation, Hearn married a 20-year-old black woman, a former slave, and was fired for breaking Ohio’s anti-miscegenation law.

Still young and restless, Hearn moved on (after a quick divorce) to a place better suited to his macabre interests, New Orleans, and there he produced a vast number of writings about the city, its Creole population, its cuisine, voodoo, its decay. More books have been written about Lafcadio Hearn than any other New Orleans resident except Louis Armstrong!

But it was in Japan that Lafcadio Hearn produced what we best know him for today. Sent by his newspaper to Japan, he fell deeply in love with that nation’s past and its strange tales of ghosts and demons. By now he had a Japanese wife, and with her help he collected folk literature and traditional tales, adapting them into haunting stories of the supernatural.

Hearn was a captivating writer, and through these ghost stories he became known as a major interpreter of Japan. When his books were translated, they became even more popular in Japan. Their appeal to Japanese readers "lies in the glimpses Hearn offered of an older, more mystical Japan lost during the country’s hectic plunge into Western-style industrialization and nation building. His books are treasured as a trove of legends and folk tales that otherwise might have vanished because no Japanese had bothered to record them."

In 1965, the Japanese director Kobayashi Masaki adapted four Hearn tales into a classic film called Kwaidan (‘ghost stories’). The image shown above is from one of the stories, ‘The Woman of the Snow.’

The Japanese title of Hearn's classic collection is 怪談, which in Modern Standard Japanese is pronounced in kaidan (MSM guàitán), which means, quite simply, "strange tales".  Yet, in transcription, it is usually referred to as kwaidan and rendered into English as "ghost stories" rather than the more accurate "strange tales", which may simply be a matter of translator's preference, but kwaidan (which strikes me as archaic [the rounded medial reminds me of Old and Middle Sinitic]) rather than kaidan, is a matter of phonology, so I set about trying to determine whence the "w" in the former.

Bob Ramsey:

Yes! There were many such archaic spellings back in his day. And you'll notice that Chinese-style spellings such as this one (representing 怪談) were common in the Edo period (1603-1867)–they were written the same way in kana–and apparently, they represented the reality of how people had once pronounced such Sino-Japanese words (but certainly NOT in the late Edo, or the Meij period (1868-1912) when Hearn was writing).

Frank Chance:

Not so much an archaic pronunciation as an archaic transcription into hiragana.　怪談 -　くわいだんin the so-called kyuukanazukai (旧仮名遣い) may reflect an earlier pronunciation difference that was already largely lost by the Edo period.   Roy Andrew Miller and other scholars explained it by noting that ancient Japanese had seven vowels, but a couple of them eventually merged into the five vowel sounds of modern Japanese.  Hence the Bodhisattva of Compassion (観音) was written in kana as くわんのん (Ku wan no n), and we find many early transcriptions of that name as Kwannon, though by the 19th century it was pronounced Kannon.  Similarly,  we see many early transcriptions of the Shogunal capital  as Yedo, which was pronounced as Edo by the nineteenth century, because the kana transcription of 江戸 was ゑど and not, as we would do it today, えど. 

This kind of transcription error is not unique to Japanese.   Even in English we have words like “often” where the “ft” did not come from a pronunciation but from the misunderstanding of the “thorn” (Þ, þ) letter used to transcribe the “t” sound.   When the thorn fell out of use among printers, it became “ft” or sometimes “st”.  Of course, there are now topolects of (American) English where that word is pronounced “off ten” reflecting the written form translated back into a pronunciation that does not match the original.

Linda Chance:

It is 旧仮名遣い「くわいだん」

I actually use this example to teach this historical spelling (spelled kwai, now pronounced kai).

Other Meiji romanizations such as "yen" and Yebisu preserve historical spellings as well.

John Whitman:

The 合口 labiovelars were borrowed from MC in Kan’on readings (which traditionally are understood to reflect Chinese Tang period pronunciations, and some Go’on readings, which are supposed to have been filtered through Korea, probably Paekche. Some kana glosses reflect <kwV> as early as the beginning of the 13th century.

For example, the 1229 glosses on the 新譯華嚴經意義 by a monk at 高山寺temple have

化　クワ　（呉音）

Some earlier glosses, directly on mss of the 新譯華嚴經, have <kw> on kan’on readings as well:

關 　クワん（漢音）1233 glosses

縣 　クヱン（漢音）1209 glosses

As these examples show, <kw> was borrowed not just with /a/ nuclei but with other vowels (e.g. <e>) as well. My memory is that some of these survive in the Jesuit transcriptions of the late 16th – early 17the century as well, but in those transcriptions kwa is by far the most numerous of this type. <Kwa> in Sino-Japanese words survives in the Kansai and Tokyo standards until the early 20th century. To this day, for example, the English name of 関西学院大学 in Kobe is Kwansei Gakuin Daigaku. Tellingly, the Japanese abbreviated name is Kangaku. 

The labiovelar pronunciation is associated with Buddhism, and more broadly, old/authoritative readings. It would have been pretty current when Hearn wrote his collection. In the 日本方言地図 collection researched in the 1960s, it was still quite widespread for common SH words like 火事, but mainly in rural areas, especially Kyushu. Hearn settled in Shimane Prefecture, so that might have been a factor too.

As for why the labiovelar SJ pronunciations disappeared, the simple answer is nativization. There were never labiovelars in any stratum of the native lexicon.

However the kw- initial of the transcription of 怪 as kwai, rather than modern kai, arose, today it smacks of antiquarianism, if not archaism.

Selected readings