People

Introduction

I work on historical linguistics with a focus on the Japanese language. In particular, I am interested in the history of language contact between Japanese and Sinitic languages and Sinitic borrowings in Japanese. While most research on borrowing in Japanese focuses on loanwords proper (i.e., the wholesale adoption of foreign vocabulary into the language), my research focuses on the influence of Literary Sinitic (Classical Chinese) via kanbun kundoku (the practice of adding glosses to Literary Sinitic texts and reading them in a vernacular language) on the native vocabulary of Japanese (i.e., semantic borrowing, loan translations, morphological and syntactic influence, etc.). Currently, I am working on developing a comprehensive classification of borrowings in kanbun kundoku and comparing the borrowing strategies used in kanbun kundoku with those found in other contact scenarios, in particular the glossing and translation of Latin texts in medieval Europe. In addition to my research on borrowing, in recent years, I have been working on developing a number of tools to help scholars more easily publish papers on Japanese linguistics in English. These include a multilingual dictionary of Japanese linguistic terminology and a set of rules for accurately transcribing and adding interlinear morphemic glosses to example sentences from Japonic languages (Modern Japanese, Classical Japanese, major dialects and Ryūkyūan languages). My major publications include An Encyclopedia of Japanese Language and Linguistics (Asakura Shoten, 2014; coeditor), for which I provided English translations for over 3,500 Japanese linguistic terms and Japanese Linguistics (Asakura Shoten, 2019; coauthored with Mark Irwin), in which we provide a comprehensive analysis of the Japanese language in English, including its origins and affiliation, history, phonology, grammar, writing system and much more.