Introduction of the IPA into <I>A Complete English-Japanese Dictionary</I> by K. Fujioka in 1921 : A Historical and Evaluative Study of Its Related Matters

Abstract

If one follows the history of phonetics as it has developed here in Japan, one finds that the first employment of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) for the phonetic notation of English words in the Japanese-English dictionary was given by Naibu Kanda and Hisashi Kanazawa, the editors of Sanseido's Concise English-Japanese Dictionary published in 1922. This view is commonly accepted by many linguists and phoneticians.In this essay, however, it is the author's hope that this popular opinion should be corrected now that Dr. Katsuji Fujioka's A Complete English-Japanese Dictionary (『大英和辞典』), Vol. 1 published by the Okura-shoten in 1921 was definitely the very dictionary that brought the IPA into use for the first time.Dr. Fujioka was then Professor of linguistics and philology at the University of Tokyo. The professor and his coeditors of the Dictionary, as most of them were his disciples, believed the introduction and diffusion of the IPA to be the most necessary means for English studies in this country.The present author has made a historical and critical survey of the matters and materials related to the professor and the Dictionary mainly in 1920's. In the light of the lexicography, the positive adoption and borrowing of the IPA must have been a very momentous and memorable process of the development of the English-Japanese dictionaries in Japan.