When Dutch was All the Rage ...
The study of the Dutch language in Japan during the Edo period (16001868) had a powerful and lasting influence on Japanese linguistic thinking. Interpretations of Dutch grammars in the early nineteenth century led to a wholesale adoption of Western grammatical concepts to analyse and explain the Japanese language, many of which are still used today.
By HENK DE GROOT
Around the middle of last year I wandered into a second hand bookshop in Osaka and asked the proprietor if he had any old books on Dutch Studies. No, he replied, he did not think so. Since his collection of string-bound books looked quite interesting, I decided to have a look around anyway. Suddenly I found myself holding a handwritten Japanese translation of Grammatica, a school textbook on Dutch grammar first published in Holland in 1814. The manuscript was worn and full of holes, but still complete. Although it was undated and anonymous, the handwriting was beautiful and corrections had been added in vermilion in the same hand certainly not the work of a beginning student. Most likely it had been written in the 1840s or 1850s. This find underlines once more the great interest in Japan in Dutch grammars during the nineteenth century.Although the Japanese had been studying the Dutch language ever since the Portuguese were banned from the country in the middle of the seventeenth century, the popularity of Dutch language studies did not reach its peak until the end of the first half of the nineteenth century. Ironically, these were the final years of national seclusion; the Japanese were soon to drop Dutch en masse in favour of English and German language studies.
The first truly academic approach to the Dutch language in Japan did not begin until the end of the eighteenth century, and this was due to the appearance of the works of the retired Nagasaki interpreter, Shizuki Tadao. Two questions about Shizuki and his work remain frequent points of discussion, namely:
a) whether he obtained his understanding of Dutch grammar by himself and without any outside help, and
b) what the whereabouts and contents are of Oranda shihink -o (On Four Elements of the Dutch Language), a ground-breaking work he was rumoured to have written. I believe that both these questions can be answered with the following explanation.
There are two quite distinct periods identifiable in Shizuki's linguistic work. The earlier period includes the Rangaku seizenfu (Dutch Studies, Dedicated to Ogy -u Sorai) and Joshik -o (On Auxiliary Words), in which Shizuki attempts to bridge the distance between the two languages in a systematic way, by means of universal principles. In Rangaku seizenfu, he mentions Dutch grammarians Pieter Marin and Francois Halma, and most of the example phrases in Joshik -o can be traced back to Marin's Dutch-French dictionary. Since both Halma's and Marin's dictionaries contain basic explanations of Dutch and French grammar, the claim that Shizuki taught himself Dutch grammar is something of an exaggeration.
The second period of Shizuki's linguistic work is entirely based on Nederduytsche Spraakkonst by the seventeenth century linguist William Sewel. It appears that, once he realized that the Dutch already possessed a comprehensive system of linguistics, Shizuki decided to give up his search for universal linguistic concepts. It has been suggested that a work in the Kyoto University collection is, in fact, Shizuki's legendary Oranda shihink -o. However, the truth of this claim is inconsequential, as all of Shizuki's later linguistic works are no more than translated summaries of the grammatical principles and models set out by Sewel.
As the anecdote in the beginning illustrates, an ample supply of original material on the study of the Dutch language in Japan during the Edo period still survives. However, these resources have long been sadly neglected as a topic for linguistic research and much still remains to be done in this area. *
Henk de Groot is a PhD candidate
at the Department of Asian Languages
at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.
E-mail: h.degroot@asia.canterbury.ac.nz