著者

田野村 忠温

出版者

関西大学大学院東アジア文化研究科

雑誌

東アジア文化交渉研究 = Journal of East Asian cultural interaction studies (ISSN:18827748)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.13, pp.61-79, 2020-03-31

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The country name '独逸', which reads 'doitsu' and denotes Germany, is an exceptional instance among the large inventory of Kanji transliterated foreign names and terms in Japanese. It is partly because '独逸', unlike many of the other Kanji transliterated place names, was not borrowed from China, but created in Japan, and partly because dozens of different Kanji transliterations were attempted before '独逸' was finally selected as the standard. This article will analyze and clarify the background and process of the establishment of '独逸'. The exceptional nature of '独逸' will be argued to result from the historical social condition of Japan, which was under self-imposed national isolation since the seventeenth century, as well as from the peculiarity of Kanji transliterations in Japanese in general as compared with those in Chinese.