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Myths and facts about the origin of Japanese modern grammar

Culture and languages

Welcome to this seminar entitled ”The Emperor’s New Grammar: Yamada Yoshio and the myths of grammar-writing in the Meiji period”!

Seminar
Date
24 Apr 2025
Time
13:15 - 14:30
Location
Room C444, Humanisten, Renströmsgatan 6

Participants
Jonathan Puntervold, GU
Good to know
The seminar will be held in English
Organizer
Department of Languages and Literatures

Jonathan Puntervold is a new assistant professor in Japanese at the Department of language and literatures. In this talk, he will present part of his ongoing research on Japanese grammar and its historiography.

A key part of Japan’s transformation into a modern nation-state was the enshrinement of Japanese as a national language (kokugo). This paper deals with the codification of Japanese grammar, although rather than tracing the actual processes by which kokugo grammar was propagated and standardised, the paper will instead examine some of the imaginary processes of language education in the Meiji period (1868-1912). Focusing on the life and work of Yamada Yoshio (1875-1958), who is as Japan’s first “great modern grammarian”, the paper will critically engage with a number of ‘myths’ which Yamada helped propagate and that still persist to this day. Specifically, the paper will focus on Yamada’s own origin story, a story in which a  5th grade pupil points out to Yamada – then a middle school teacher working in rural Japan – that their grammar textbook was wrong, prompting Yamada write his own grammar. The paper argues that significant parts of this story – which was eventually published as an essay, and circulated widely both before and after the the Pacific War – were likely contrived, effectively creating a kind of ‘fairy tale’ for the purpose of spreading a particular conservative ideology of language.