Page:Kojiki by Chamberlain.djvu/80

lxx that the more recent mythic fancy of Japan has shown itself as little impenetrable to such influence as have the manners and customs of the people. The only difference is that assimilation has of late proceeded with much greater rapidity.

In this, language is another guide; for, though the discoverable traces of Chinese influence are comparatively few in the Archaic Dialect, yet they are there. This is a subject which has as yet scarcely been touched. Two Japanese authors of an elder generation, Kahibara and Arawi Hakuseki, did indeed point out the existence of some such traces. But they drew no inference from them, they did not set to work to discover new ones, and their indications, except in one or two obvious cases, have received little attention from later writers whether native or foreign. But when we compare such words as kane, kume, kuni, saka, tana, uma, and many others with the pronunciation now given, or with that which the phonetic laws of the language in its earlier stage would have caused to be given, to their Chinese equivalents, , , , , , etc., the idea forces way that such coincidences of sound and sense cannot all be purely accidental; and when moreover we find that the great majority of the words in question denote things or ideas that were almost certainly imported, we perceive that a more thorough sifting of Archaic Japanese (especially of botanical and zoological names and of the names of implements and manufactures) would probably be the best means of discovering at least the negative features of an antiquity remoter than all written documents, remoter even than the crystallization of the legends which those documents have preserved. In dealing with Korean words found in Archaic Japanese we tread on more delicate ground; for there we have a language which, unlike Chinese, stands to Japanese in the closest family relationship, making it plain that many coincidences of sound and sense should be ascribed to radical affinity rather than to later intercourse. At the same time it appears more probable that, for instance, such seemingly indigenous Japanese terms as Hotoke, “Buddha,” and tera, “Buddhist temple,” should have been in fact borrowed from the corresponding Korean words Puchhö and chöl than that both nations should have independently chosen homonyms to denote the same foreign ideas. Indeed, it will perhaps not be too bold to assume that in the case of Hotoke, “Buddha,”