Romanization systems, text segmentation and morphemic analysis in the study of Old Japanese texts

要旨

This particular study is an inconspicuous part of a large project – new academic translations
\nof the songs of “Kojiki” and “Nihon Shoki” into Russian published recently at Amazon publ.
\nThey contain original texts, romanization, glossing, translations into Russian and some commentaries.
\nSuch a book falls within a structural approach in diachronic linguistics. Structural
\nlinguistic analyses involve morphemes identification and glossing — we pay special attention
\nto phonetics when analyzing Old Japanese texts. The morphemic analysis is rather complicated
\nwithout a detailed phonetic study of the language period, which serves as a basis for
\nmany morphemic phenomena. When using structural and morphemic analyses, we admit
\ntier structure of the language, which presupposes morphophonemic level. In addition to their
\nclassical definition, morphemes here function as phonemes combination, what in many cases
\nhelps to avoid misreadings. In this limited space I will try to give answers to the following
\nquestions: why do we use one or another romanization system while transliterating Old Japanese
\ntext; why it is vital for academic translations to use transliteration, rather than syllabic
\nscript; what transliteration systems do we have today and what are the particular benefits of
\neach of them, offering readers explanations of the main differences between layered structure
\nof Old Japanese and classical Japanese grammar (see, for example, translated into Russian in
\n2017 textbook in Classical Japanese by Haruo Shirane).

主題