ABSTRACT
The purpose of this paper is to develop an analysis of hentai kanbun word order and identify the principle which accounts for both its Chinese and its non-Chinese aspects . The non-Chinese aspects of hentai kanbun word order have traditionally been dismissed as Chinese grammar mistakes, the result of the writer's ignorance of standard Classical Chinese or interference from his native language, Japanese. One such assessment is as follows :
Hentai kanbun began as an off-shoot of orthodox Chinese, the imperfect product of attempts to write about Japanese subjects using standard Chinese. tRabinovitch 1996: 1(5) In putting Japanese thoughts down on paper in a manner that imitated Chinese syntax, Japanese sentence structure often intruded itself despite all efforts to transcend it, this causing deviation from Chinese norms. (Rabinovitch 1996: 1(2)
In this paper I will show that hentai kanbun word order is not merely a random collection of Chinese grammar mistakes but rather the result of systematic encoding of Japanese word order. This encoding process operates primarily on the basis of head-inititialness, a concept borrowed from Chinese syntax, which gives hentai kanbun the overall appearance of Chinese. However, as hentai kanbun encoding is a much simpler process than translation between two natural languages, the output cannot be expected to fully resemble standard Classical Chinese and hence contains numerous anomalous word order types that would never be found in true Chinese.
