Diego Collados Grammar of the Japanese Language | Page 4

all of his precursor's virtues. The Salamanca grammar of 1481 is a masterpiece of orderly presentation. Printed in lettera formata with carefully indented subdivisions, it offers the student a clear display of the conjugational system as well as long columns of Latin examples of a given grammatical structure, accompanied on the right side of the page with Spanish equivalents. Collado makes little effort at copying this orderly display. There are in his presentation no paradigms, but instead only loosely connected sentences that talk the student through the various forms of the conjugation; and there is no orderly array of examples. Add to this the innumerable factual and typographical errors, and one is left with a presentation that lacks most of the basic scholarly virtues of its precursor.
A similar criticism may be leveled against the work from the point {6} of view of Rodriguez' influence. Without matching the Introductiones in orderliness, the Arte more than compensates for its casual format by containing a mass of exhaustively collected and scrupulously presented linguistic data.[6] There was available no better source than the Arte from which Collado might have culled his examples of Japanese.
One doubt that remains in assessing Collado's use of Rodriguez' material is that perhaps his presentation of the most readily understandable material in the Arte is not so much an effort on his part to simplify the learning of Japanese for his students, as it is a reflection of his lack of adequate familiarity with the language he was teaching.
The Phonological System
A study of the phonological data reveals the Ars Grammaticae Iaponicae Linguae to be of minimal historical value. Any student of the phonology of early modern Japanese should turn to the far more reliable work of Father Rodriguez. Nevertheless, certain aspects of Collado's transcription require our attention.
The most obvious innovation in the representation of the language is Collado's transcription with an i of the palatal consonant which all his contemporaries record with a y. Thus in the text we find iomi and coie (terms for native words and Chinese borrowings) where Rodriguez writes yomi and coye. This change was affected while the text was being translated from the Spanish manuscript which uses y; and Collado himself must have felt the innovation to be of dubious value since he retained y for the spellings in the Dictionarium.[7]
Collado's handling of the nasal sounds is too inconsistent to be a reliable source for phonological data. Given his rather awkward specification that nasalization is predictable before what we must assume he means to be the voiced stops and affricates,[8] his grammar presents an uncomfortably irregular pattern in the transcription of the phenomena. Thus, on page 39 we find vo m?dori aró ca? as well as {7} modori aró ca?. Again, what he presents as the ending z[~u]ba in his description of the formation of the negative conditional (p. 34) appears in tovazunba in its only occurrence in a sample sentence (p. 62). To further confound the issue such forms as tovazunba and qinpen occur in contrast to sambiacu, varambe, and var?be.
In Chart 1 the traditional pattern of the goj[=u]onzu (chart of 50 sounds) is followed as a convenient framework in which to display the transcriptional system employed by Collado.
Chart 1
COLLADO'S TRANSCRIPTION SYSTEM
The Simple Series
/#/ /k/ /g/ /s/ /z/ /t/ /d/ /n/ /[phi]/ /b/ /p/ /m/ /y/ /r/ /w/
/a/ a ca ga sa za ta da na fa ba pa ma ia ra va /i/ i qi gui xi ji chi gi ni fi bi pi mi - ri - /u/ u cu gu su zu t?u zzu nu fu bu pu mu iu ru - /e/ [ie] qe gue xe je te de ne fe be pe me ie re - /o/ [vo] co go so zo to do no fo bo po mo io ro vo
The Long Series
/au/ [vó] có gó só zó tó dó nó fó bó (pó) mó ió ró vó /uu/ ú cú (gú)(sú) - (t?ú) - - fú (bú)(pú) - iú rú - /ou/ [v?] c? (g?) s? z? t? d? n? (f?) (b?) p? m? i? r? v?
The Palatal and Labial Series
/ky/ /sy/ /ty/ /ny/ /by/ /my/ /kw/ /gy/ /zy/ /dy/ /[phi]y/ /py/ /ry/ /gw/
/a/ (qua)(guia) xa ja cha gia (nha) fia bia pia (mia) (ria) qua gua /u/ qui (guia) xu ju (chu)(giu)(nhu)(fiu) - - (miu) (riu) - - /o/ qio guio xo (jo) cho gio (nho)(fio)(bio) - (mio) (rio) - - ------------------------------------------------------------------------- /au/ qió guió xó jó chó gió - (fió)(bió) - mió (rió) quó guó /uu/ (qiú)(guiú)(xú) jú (chú) giú nhú - - - - (riú) - - /ou/ qi? (gui?) x? j? ch? gi? nh? fi? (bi?) pi? (mi?) (ri?) - - gue? ge? ne? be? re?
In this chart the phonemic grid is presented in a broad phonetic {8} notation while the underlined entries