Gregory Matteson said:
:
:        Just a couple of minor details, stemming from chat.
:        First, I have twice given the date for Tale of Genji as 1200.
:Slipped a digit, correct date is 1020.  Let's see, the two early warning
:signs of old age...the second one is memory loss, the first...darn it, I
:just can't remember.

    Some of th earliest surviving scrolls of this work are from
    the 12th century, so the confusion might be more than just a
    mix of the digits.  Also, I've heard varying numbers of the
    "correct" year including 1000 and 1010 (more scholars seem
    to settle on this number).

:        Someone asked me if Genji was written in Kanji or Kana.  It, and all
:the other great literature of the period was written in vernacular Japanese,
:in Hiragana, by women; western scholarly opinion being that the men were too
:busy trying to write in the T'ang period Chinese in which Japan was
:introduced to literacy, and which, by the beginning of the Heian period,
:was a dead language.

    The Heian period started in 894 AD, when Japan broke off
    relations with the Tang Dynasty.  Everything they gathered
    from China had to have taken place earlier.  You'd think
    that the women would have been exposed to kanji 100 years
    after the self-imposed isolation.

:        Hiragana and Katakana were developed in the early Heian period,
:probably by a Buddhist monk.

    To be even more complicated, hiragana and katakana were a
    simplification of an even older and more complex phonetic
    written alphabeta called "man'yougana", which in turn was
    based on kanji.


___/^_^\___ Eugene Lee
            zangief@netcom.com