Abstract
The present article reports on harushīya no kuchi, a Persian-lexified pidgin that was recorded in 18th-century Japan. It describes several of its lexical and grammatical features. The features of harushīya no kuchi described in this article include the (1) tendency for some frequently occurring verbs to converge on a small number of specific forms, (2) apparent preservation of colloquial Persian vowel assimilation in some verbs, (3) right-headed noun compounding, (4) existence of a topic marker, and (5) high analyticity of some numerals.
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Notes
- 1.
The naturalist was Engelbert Kämpfer (1651–1716), who resided in Nagasaki from 1690 to 1692.
- 2.
In addition to these places, merchant ships would also come to Nagasaki from Europe, which would be handled by another group of rapporteur-interpreters called the oranda tsūji. This title is a compound of 阿蘭陀 oranda ‘Holland’ and 通詞 tsūji ‘interpreter’.
- 3.
Tonkin tsūji should be understood to mean not ‘an interpreter of the northern dialect of Vietnamese’ but ‘a rapporteur on issues involving ships from northern Vietnam and their crews’, because the language variety which Gi identifies as that of Tonkin is, according to Nakajima (2000), not (northern) Vietnamese but a Chinese dialect peppered with a small number of Vietnamese words. This said, the first volume of chōtanwa contains a list in which the words used for numbering look like Vietnamese numerals (Nagashima, 1986a: 143); Compare motsu, hai, bā, bon, namu, and shau in the list with Vietnamese một ‘one’, hai ‘two’, ba ‘three’, bốn ‘four’, năm ‘five’, and sáu ‘six’.
- 4.
There were such appointments as mouru tsūji, shamuro tsūji (lit. ‘Siam expert’), and ruson/roson tsūji (lit. ‘Luzon expert’) within the tōtsūji group. According to Wada (1980: 44–45), the term roson/rosun tsūji appears only in two records. Xu (2012: 272) writes that tōtsūji attending to non-Chinese regions were later transferred to another group of rapporteur-interpreters, namely the oranda tsūji.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
That kuchi was used in the sense of ‘the language of a state’ in Nagasaki is evident from chōtanwa (vol. 5: pp. 27, 29, 31) as well as from the entry for “cuchi” in the supplement to Vocabulario da Lingoa de Iapam (1603) published in 1604 in Nagasaki. The supplement describes one of the meanings of “cuchi” as “Lingoagem de qualquer reyno” ‘language of any (given) kingdom’ and translates “Nifonno cuchi” which consists of Nifon ‘Japan’, the genitive case marker no, and cuchi ‘mouth’ as “Lingoa de Iapão” ‘language of Japan’ (“Cuchi*”, 1975; Doi et al., 1980: 160).
- 9.
- 10.
The second and third of the non-Chinese varieties both look like pidgins (Ōhashi, 1983: 44–45) lexified mainly by (a) Romance language(s). As houran/houron apparently refers to Holland, and teisu/tesusu looks suspiciously like Dutch Duits ‘German’, one may be prompted to think that the second of these three varieties is a Germanic language. However, with such words as pesoe for ‘this’ and monda/rū for ‘mountain’, its lexicon is hardly identifiable as Germanic. On the other hand, the third variety contains lexical items bearing a resemblance to those of some Romance languages, such as runa for ‘moon’ and teira for ‘earth’ (note also the resemblance of isubā to Portuguese Espanha ‘Spain’ and that of isubanyoro to Spanish español ‘Spanish’), but grammatically it is a departure from the Romance languages. It is unclear why indea is among the names given to the state, or states, to which the third variety is attributed by Gi, but since Portuguese lexified a number of pidgins and creoles at port towns in South Asia (Cardoso, 2009: 5–7; De Silva Jayasuriya, 1999; Smith, 1977), from Gi’s perspective, some regions in India may have been linguistically Portuguese. Incidentally, in many entries in chōtanwa, the second and third varieties differ only partially from one another. This might be because Gi perceived a dutchified form of Portuguese to be Dutch traders’ main language. After all, Portuguese was the primary medium of communication that Nagasaki interpreters used with European traders before Dutch and colloquial Japanese gradually replaced it in the Edo period (Boxer, 1950: 58–59; Cullen, 2018; Joby, 2021: 25, 35, 154–162; Koga, 1983: 49–59).
- 11.
The first and second volumes contain a much smaller number of HnK words and phrases. The fourth volume contains only a few words of HnK, while the third volume contains none. Incidentally, there are a number of duplicate entries in chōtanwa among its volumes.
- 12.
See Labrune (2012: 10–11, 88–90) for an explanation of reduced-size kana and of yō’on they represent.
- 13.
- 14.
Harusha survived into the post-Edo era in such compounds as harushagawa, which refers to “[a] kind of coloured leather formerly brought from Persia by Dutch merchants” (Brinkley et al., 1896: 306) and harushagiku ‘Coreopsis tinctoria’.
- 15.
Mouru appears to have been a household word in the officialdom of pre-modern Nagasaki, where there were officials holding the title of mouru tsūji (lit. ‘mouru expert’) within the tōtsūji group.
- 16.
Nakata (1974: 79–80) refers to the edition as teisei shijūnikoku jinbutsu zusetsu ‘revised and annotated pictorial descriptions of people from 42 countries’, which, incidentally, also notes that the true name of mōru is mogorisutan. Mōru survived into modern Japanese in which it referred to “[a] kind of thick cloth woven with raised figures, originarily brought from Mogul in India but now produced in Japan for ornamental purposes” (Brinkley et al., 1896: 958).
- 17.
- 18.
- 19.
I opt to call HnK not a jargon but a pidgin in the present article because, judging from Bakker (2008: 132), the term pidgin seems to be the most widely used of the existing terms for various forms of speech that are used between people without a common language and also because HnK seems to fit Parkvall’s (2019: 262) characterization of pidgin as “a lingua franca that is lexically and structurally very restricted, but which has an amount of norms and stability across its speakers”.
- 20.
- 21.
This taān probably derives from Chinese tāng ‘hot water, soup’.)
- 22.
This is of course provided that only one variety of Persian served as the main lexifier for HnK.
- 23.
Note that the word I transliterate here as hokon has multiple possible readings. It is open to the following three readings: hokon, pokon, and bokon. See §2 for an explanation of the transliteration system used in this article.
- 24.
This ga, whose function in HnK is obscure, may derive from the Japanese subject marker ga.
- 25.
Persian šey’ ‘thing’ is a loanword from Arabic. Although I analyse mushikera shī as comprising two morphemes, namely mushikera < Perso-Arabic moškel ‘difficult’ and shī, here, it is possible that, in HnK, mushikerashī is used as a single adjective by analogy with Japanese adjectives ending in shi.
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This work was supported in part by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (KAKENHI Grant Number 22K00527) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).
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Ido, S. (2025). A Persian-Lexified Pidgin Recorded in 18th-Century Japan. In: Korangy, A., Mahmoodi-Bakhtiari, B. (eds) The Handbook of Persian Dialects and Dialectology. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-8151-9_4
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