Talk:Makurakotoba

October 2009

I am in the process of incorporating historical and scholarly material from the Japanese version of this article. I have uploaded a direct translation of the article:

http://www.laits.utexas.edu/wiki/theory/pmwiki.php?n=Main.Makurakotoba

I will be slowly revising the English version in more coherent language to reflect additional historical information.

Thanks!

"Examples" section has problems

The ==Examples== section has some problems:

1. The romaji could use better spacing to correctly indicate word and particle boundaries.
   • The line komo yo mikomochi, for instance, would be better written as ko mo yo, mi-ko mochi: the ko here is the "basket" portion, and mo and yo are particles, while mi- is an honorific prefix on ko, and mochi is the verb at the end.
2. The romaji is wrong in a few places.
   • The line ie norase na norasane in particular is wrong. The source and corresponding kana, per http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/japanese/manyoshu/Man1Yos.html:

   家吉閑名 告<紗>根

   家聞かな 告らさね

   いへきかな,のらさね

   ie kika na, norasa ne

3. The translation is wrong in a few places.
   • The line ie norase na norasane appears to be wrong, not just for the mis-transcription -- the na here seems to be not wikt:名 "name" literally, despite using that kanji, but rather a use of the kanji as a phonetic man'yōgana for ending particle (wikt:終助詞) na, used in old Japanese after the 未然形 or incomplete form of a verb to indicate desire, in this case probably what the speaker wants to do, while the ne on the end is similar, but probably what the speaker wants the listener to do. A better translation would thus be "I want to hear of your house/family; tell me about it."
   • There doesn't seem to be much certainty about the likely meaning of soramitsu, but it's probably not "seen from the sky", despite the related tale in the Nihon Shoki -- Japanese just doesn't form compounds that way. Noun + verb stem generally parses out to object + verbing, so 空見 sorami semantically would be more like "sky-watching". For instance, Fuji-mi shows up in a lot of Japanese place names, meaning not "seen from Mt. Fuji" but rather "Fuji-view". Even if sorami were "sky-watching", the tsu would be the old Japanese possessive particle, so the romaji would be sorami tsu, or sora-mi tsu. The sources I've read suggest that this is possibly from 空満つ大和, i.e. the yama (mountains) mitsu (fill) the sora (sky), or "sky-filling Yamato"; or possibly from 空御津, i.e. sora (sky) mi (hon. prefix) tsu (harbor), in reference to the god Nigihayahi-no-mikoto coming down from the heavens in his boat and finding Yamato a useful harbor.

Given that the text in this section is quoted from a printed work[1], I'm loath to just jump in and make the changes, as that would suggest that the edited text itself came from the referenced source. Would it be acceptable to fix the text and add a note that this is adapted from the listed reference, rather than quoted from it? -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 19:58, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

Man'yo shu, which uses Man'yōgana, is too old to offer good examples. Better to seek another, clearer one from later periods.--124.27.136.230 (talk) 00:25, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

Large quantity of content removed

A large quantity of content was removed from this article in this edit and this edit specifically, including the removal of a number of references. Someone might want to go over these and see that they get re-added in if worthwhile – this isn't my area of research, so I've no barometer for what sources would need to stay removed, but such a large removal with the edit summary "got rid of some odd stuff" is a red flag to me.--Ineffablebookkeeper (talk) ({{ping}} me!) 10:30, 11 May 2022 (UTC)