Читать книгу A Catalogue of Manuscripts Known to Contain Old English Dry-Point Glosses - Dieter Studer-Joho - Страница 25

Pre-modern dry-point glossing is not limited to the European Middle Ages, but it is also reported from East Asian MSS. More than 3,000 Japanese MSS bearing dry-point glosses have been identified since Prof. Yoshinori Kobayashi discovered the phenomenon in 1961.1 The oldest specimens of this so-called kakuhitsu writingdry-pointin Asiakakuhitsu2 identified so far date to AD 749 and the most recent specimens date to AD 1910, spanning more than eleven centuries of continuous dry-point practice. In 1993, Kobayashi and a colleague of his, Prof. Yasukazu Yoshizawa, discovered similar dry-point writing in 16 MSS from Dunhuang (China), now kept in the British Library, dating from the early 5^th to the 10^th c. Yoshizawa & Kobayashi (1999: 5) think that the dry-point writing in these Dunhuang MSS was entered by students who were taking notes during a lecture. They also think that these notes may ultimately help to verify the pronunciation of Classical Chinese and give insights into the methods of Buddhist teaching. Yoshizawa even invented an apparatus specifically for the study of dry-point writing, called kakuhitsu scope, “which consists of a special lamp, a metallic case, reflectors and filters, and enables the characters to be read and photographed” (Yoshizawa & Kobayashi 1999: 4).

In Korean, dry-point writing is known as kakp’ilkakp’il writing writing (kakp’il meaning ‘stylus’ in Korean). The existence of kakp’il writing in Korean MSS was only discovered in the year 2000, again by the Japanese scholar Kobayashi. According to King (2010: 219), Kobayashi’s discovery “revolutionized thinking on the history of writing in both Korea and Japan, and has forced scholars to go back and re-examine virtually every single Koryŏ-era [AD 918–1392] hanmun (Literary Sinitic) [i.e. Classical Chinese] text of a canonic Buddhist or Confucian nature for the presence of kakp’il [dry-point] kugyŏl markings [i.e. annotations that render Chinese more easily understandable for Koreans].” The interest in glossing in general and dry-point glossing in particular has since been rising in East Asia, and King reports that “kugyŏl studies have become the ‘final frontier’ of Korean historical linguistics” (ibid.).

Since Asian MSS are composed of paper, rather than parchment, the typical Asian stylus looks quite different from the typical European stylus. Asian styli are usually made of wood, bamboo or ivory (never brass, iron or silver) and have a length of about 24 cm. They are 6–10 mm thick and have a pointed end used in writing. Yoshizawa & Kobayashi (1999: 4) report that some of the styli found in Japanese shrines, temples, palaces or museums still showed fibrous remains at their tips, which could be shown to be microscopic scraps of Japanese paper through chemical analysis.