Lady Murasaki Speaking Mandarin and the Language of the Wild East

As a literary enthusiast, I’m somewhat hooked by this year’s Taiga drama by NHK 📺, “Hikaru no Kimi he (#光の君へ / Dear Radiance)” featuring Murasaki Shikbu (紫式部). She wrote the Tale of Genji (源氏物語, Genji Monogatari), the epic 11th-century romance novel.

Of course, it is full of bold and wild fantasy for added entertainment. Yet, it cleverly incorporates many passages from old scripts and poems which makes it worth watching. In past episodes set in Echizen, a province facing the Sea of Japan, you even hear Murasaki Shikibu practicing #Chinese under the tutorship of a young Chinese man.
 
Although I acknowledge the great efforts that the actor and actress go to in order to reproduce pretty passable Chinese, it did bother me that they were speaking in #Mandarin (北京語、普通語). The Chinese spoken in those days by people from the Song dynasty (宋人) would have sounded quite different.
 
I learnt a bit of Chinese at school but am by no means a sinologist.
So, why do I know all this?
 
Well, it takes a bit of explanation.
👉 To start with, let’s look at how we, Japanese, read our characters.
 
🖌 🖌 A Crash Course in Japanese 🖌 🖌
We imported #Kanji (漢字), which are logographic characters, from China and developed our own writing system by adopting them.
 
Basically, there are two ways of reading Kanji – #Onyomi (音読み) and #Kunyomi (訓読み). The former refers to the Chinese reading and the latter to the Japanese reading of Kanji characters. Kunyomi is historical “#transcreation” by the Japanese, who use Chinese characters to express their native vocabularies. Hence, it is only natural that the Kunyomi reading of the same character has many variations.
 
Onyomi (transcription of Chinese original sounds in Japanese) must be easier in comparison.
 
Alas, dear Japanese learners around the world, haven’t you ever wondered why Onyomi reading is so illogical. The same character can be read again in many different ways.
 
A typical example is 男女 🚻. Its standard Onyomi is “Danjo” (Otoko ♂ and Onna ♀ in Kunyomi to add to the confusion).
 
It should be read, however, as “Nannyo” in a set phrase of 老若男女.
The difference comes from when or how we adopted Chinese characters.
 
Nanjyo is a so-called Go-on (呉音) pronunciation, originating from the southern part of China which reached Japan – possibly via Korea – prior to the Sui dynasty (隋, 581 – 618 AD) or Tang dynasty (唐, 618 – 907 AD).
 
In addition, the variety of Kanji reading includes Kan-on (漢音, Han pronunciation), So-on (宋音, Song pronunciation) and To-on (唐音, Tang pronunciation) depending on when we imported or reimported Chinese characters.
 
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Coming back to the Chinese dialogues spoken in the said drama, I should not be overly critical. In the drama, ancient people in the capital city of Kyoto are speaking in modern Japanese. That’s strange enough.😳
 
The current #standard Japanese (標準語) originates from the Kanto region (roughly the area around Tokyo). Lady Murasaki would turn in her grave if she could hear herself speaking in #Azuma-kotoba (東言葉/the language of the Wild East)!
 
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