Classical Japanese ─ A Grammar

Written by a leading scholar in the field, "Classical Japanese: A Grammar" is an elegant, comprehensive, and practical guide to classical Japanese. Extensive notes and historical explanations make this volume useful as both a reference for advanced students and a textbook for beginning students.Classical Japanese ( "bungo") was used to write Japanese for more thirteen hundred years, until World War II. The volume, which explains how classical Japanese is related to modern Japanese, includes

Detailed explanations of basic grammar, including helpful, easy-to-use tables of grammatical forms

Annotated excerpts from classical premodern texts, with accompanying grammar and vocabulary notes

Exercises and an answer booklet

Detailed explanations of honorific expressions

Appendixes on sound changes, prefixes, and suffixes, rhetorical techniques, and auxiliary verb combinations

Haruo Shirane is Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. He is the author of The Bridge of Dreams: A Poetics of The Tale of Genji and Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho; and an editor of Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature and Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600--1900.