ABC Dictionary of Sino-Japanese Readings 9780824872243

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ABC Dictionary of Sino-Japanese Readings

ABC CHINESE DICTIONARY SERIES Victor H. Mair, General Editor The ABC Chinese Dictionary Series aims to provide a complete set of convenient and reliable reference tools for all those who need to deal with Chinese words and characters. A unique feature of the series is the adoption of a strict alphabetical order, the fastest and most user-friendly way to look up words in a Chinese dictionary. Most volumes contain graphically oriented indices to assist in finding characters whose pronunciation is not known. The ABC dictionaries and compilations rely on the best expertise available in China and North America and are based on the application of radically new strategies for the study of Sinitic languages and the Chinese writing system, including the first clear distinction between the etymology of the words, on the one hand, and the evolution of shapes, sounds, and meanings of characters, on the other. While aiming for conciseness and accuracy, series volumes also strive to apply the highest standards of lexicography in all respects, including compatibility with computer technology for information processing. Other titles in the series ABC Chinese-English Dictionary (desk reference and pocket editions) Edited by John DeFrancis ABC Dictionary of Chinese Proverbs Edited by John S. Rohsenow ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary Edited by John DeFrancis An Alphabetical Index to the Hanyu Da Cidian Edited by Victor H. Mair A Handbook of 'Phags-pa Chinese W. South Coblin ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese Axel Schuessler Minimal Old Chinese and Later Han Chinese: A Companion to Grammata Serica Recensa Axel Schuessler ABC English-Chinese Chinese-English Dictionary Edited by John DeFrancis and Zhang Yanyin ABC Dictionary of Ancient Japanese Phonograms John R. Bentley

ABC Dictionary of Sino-Japanese Readings Victor H. Mair

University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu

© 2016 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 21 20 19 18 17 16

6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 978-0-8248-2331-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources.

Print-ready copy prepared by Thomas E. Bishop of Wenlin Institute, Inc.

To all the great Japanese Sinologists past and present and To Patricia Crosby, éditeur extraordinaire

CONTENTS Preface How to Use This Dictionary ABC Dictionary of Sino-Japanese Readings

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PREFACE Few books that have been published will have undergone a longer gestation period than this one. Feeling the need for an easy-to-use tool that would enable Sinologists and other China specialists to look up the Japanese readings of Chinese characters by their Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) pronunciation, I began compiling this dictionary sometime around 1995. By 1997, the work was essentially finished, and I delivered the manuscript to the University of Hawai‘i Press not long thereafter. It was reviewed and accepted for publication in short order and was scheduled to come out in February 2001. The dictionary was advertised in Press catalogs and actually sold hundreds of copies; I even saw it listed in library catalogs in various universities as I traveled around the world in the following years. Most unfortunately, it never appeared. What happened is that, in the final review for the Press, a colleague suggested that it would be nice to add the special readings for proper names. Wishing to be accommodating and wanting this dictionary to be maximally useful, I agreed to add the special readings. That was in the year 2000. It is now 2016, so the dictionary got stuck for sixteen years because of that reviewer’s suggestion. I had put so much effort into the initial compilation that somehow I just could not bring myself to confront the material all over again. Although, with the help of others, some of whom I’ll name below, I made sporadic efforts to complete the promised additions (which probably only amounted to one tenth of the whole), other commitments and a lack of resolve meant that I was unable to finalize the dictionary until now. Regardless of the torturesome delay for the last decade and a half, my aim has always been the same: to produce a reference tool that would permit Chinese scholars to look up the Japanese readings of Sinitic characters by their Mandarin pronunciations. I recall that, as a graduate student, this was something that I often wished had been available to me. Fully realizing the excellence and abundance of Japanese Sinology and Chinese studies in general, I was keenly aware of the necessity for consulting and citing research in Japanese. The problem is that, although I knew the sounds of the terms and names in Chinese, I did not know them in Japanese. Furthermore, Japanese indices and reference works were (and still are) arranged by pronunciation. Consequently, if you do not know the Japanese pronunciations, you simply cannot look things up in most works of Japanese scholarship directly. This means that, to find things in Japanese sources, we first had to look up the sound of each character by the painful means of radical plus residual strokes and then use the Japanese sounds to find particular items—a clumsy, time-consuming, two-stage process. Of course, after we had taken two or three years of Japanese language, we knew the pronunciations of a thousand or so characters, but that was not nearly enough for the type of Sinological research in which we were engaged. Furthermore, Japanese kanji usually have ix

Preface

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two or more types of pronunciations, and in our introductory and intermediate Japanese-language courses, we normally only learned the most common pronunciation. 7KH ILUVW VWDJH RI ZRUN RQ WKH SUHVHQW GLFWLRQDU\ ZDV EDVHG SULPDULO\ RQ /Π +qWyQJ /iL