A Diachronic Perspective on Segmentation Cues in Written Japanese

From Script Mixture, Size, and Spacing to the Reinvention of a Corollary of Cursive Writing

Abstract

While the role of script mixture as an effective means of providing segmentation cues to readers of Japanese is commonly addressed with reference to the modern writing system, the situation in premodern times is largely understudied, and an overview is still lacking. This is by no means due to a lack of strategies to provide segmentation cues in earlier forms of written Japanese, which included but were not limited to script mixture. In fact, a large variety of further strategies is attested, be it in either of the realms of hiragana or katakana, or in times prior to the development of visually distinct phonograms. Depending on the respective time and intellectual background, the means identified in this paper as a first attempt at an overview relate to different kinds of linguistic boundaries, for instance between constituents, words, or morphemes. As reflections of linguistic awareness, both on the part of native speakers of Japanese and of non-native observers, they thus offer us valuable glimpses at forms of linguistic analysis that were for the most part never made explicit.