“A literary translation will inevitably call for poetically-sounding English at the expense of the Japanese text. However, I want to present the Man'yoshu to the reader having preserved to the maximum possible extent the flavor and the actual semantics of the poems. That is, I want the Japanese poets of that distant age to speak to the reader in their own words, and not on the terms of modern English poetics. … I provide original text,
kana, romanization, and glossing with morphemic analysis” 😮🙌
—Alexander Vovin, “Man'yōshū: A New English Translation Containing the Original Text, Kana Transliteration, Romanization, Glossing and Commentary”.
This book is INSANE. Look at the quality and amount of the analysis (the commentary goes on for another page).
Alexander Vovin, “Man'yōshū: A New English Translation Containing the Original Text, Kana Transliteration, Romanization, Glossing and Commentary”.
‘although /b/, /d/, /g/, and /z/ agree very well with the modern standard Japanese and with Kansai dialect pronunciation, it is well known that these voiced stops were actually pronounced in Old Japanese as they are pronounced today in modern Tohoku (東北) dialects, namely as prenasalized voiced /ᵐb/, /ⁿd/, /ᵑg/, and /ⁿz/.’
I find this scandalous. Also, Unicode-fu FTW.