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9781793614421

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""To carry out her study on early Japanese poetic texts (the Manyoshu), Dr. Watanabe had to immerse herself in traditional scholarship and then clear away some systematic misreadings by earlier scholars, supporting her emendations, inter alia, by the syllable count of the verse form (5-7-5 and the like). Sifting the apparent meanings and non-linguistic contexts of the verses poem by poem, she argues that traditional views of the past-tense system (four perfects, two different pasts) did not hold water as a description, in addition to being unparalleled elsewhere in the world. Her conclusions give early Japanese a much more believable and familiar-looking system of morphological markers for aspects and tenses, not so divergent from modern Romance languages, and enable her to trace a reasonable path of historical development to later Japanese and even to the present-day system."" -- Wayles Browne, Cornell University

To carry out her study on early Japanese poetic texts (the Manyoshu), Dr. Watanabe had to immerse herself in traditional scholarship and then clear away some systematic misreadings by earlier scholars, supporting her emendations, inter alia, by the syllable count of the verse form (5-7-5 and the like). Sifting the apparent meanings and non-linguistic contexts of the verses poem by poem, she argues that traditional views of the past-tense system (four perfects, two different pasts) did not hold water as a description, in addition to being unparalleled elsewhere in the world. Her conclusions give early Japanese a much more believable and familiar-looking system of morphological markers for aspects and tenses, not so divergent from modern Romance languages, and enable her to trace a reasonable path of historical development to later Japanese and even to the present-day system. -- Wayles Browne, Cornell University

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Kazuha Watanabe is associate professor and coordinator of the Japanese program in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at California State University, Fullerton.

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