Arte da Lingoa de Iapam


The Art of the Japanese Language is an early 17th-century Portuguese grammar of the Japanese language. It was compiled by João Rodrigues, a Portuguese Jesuit missionary. It is the oldest fully extant Japanese grammar and is a valuable reference for the late middle period of the Japanese language.

Background

began in the 1540s, necessitating the learning of its language. Missionaries created dictionaries and grammars. Early grammars seem to have been written in the 1580s, but are no longer extant. João Rodrigues arrived in Japan as a teenager and became so fluent that he was mostly known to locals as "the Translator" ; he served as the translator of visiting Jesuit overseers, as well as for the shōguns Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu. His Arte da Lingoa de Iapam is the oldest extant complete Japanese grammar. Rodrigues published it in three volumes at Nagasaki over the five years between 1604 and 1608. In addition to vocabulary and grammar, it includes details on the country's dynasties, currency, measures, and other commercial information. There are only two known copies: one at the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford and the other in the Crawford family collection.
Following a violent suppression of marauding Japanese sailors in Macao in 1608 and court intrigues the next year, however, Tokugawa resolved to replace Portuguese traders with red seal ships, the Dutch, and the Spanish in early 1610. After a successful assault on a Portuguese ship then in Nagasaki Bay, he permitted most of the missionaries to remain but replaced Rodrigues with the Englishman William Adams.
Rodrigues then joined the China missions, where he published a terser revised grammar called The Short Art of the Japanese Language at Macao in 1620. It reformulates the treatment of grammar in the earlier "Great Art", establishing clear and concise rules regarding the principal features of the Japanese language.

Contents

The grammar is three volumes in length.
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The Great Art was translated into Japanese by Tadao Doi in 1955.
The Short Art was translated into French by M.C. Landresse as Elements of Japanese Grammar in 1825, with a supplement added the next year.

Citations