SUGGESTIVNESS OF THE “OFUDESAKI” TEXT: INTENTION OR FORTUITOUSNESS?

Abstract

The article goal is to single out and describe verbal means of suggestive influence on the recipient of “Ofudesaki” text a translation erbatim from Japanese: “At the tip of the brush”), which is the main script of the Tenrikyo religion, one of the “oldest” among the many newest syncretic religions in Japan, founded by a simple peasant Nakayama Miki (1797-1887) in 1838. The text “Ofudesaki”, written by the founder of this religion “from the words of God the Father” in 1869-1881, consists of 17 chapters and 1711 tanka poems, which vividly reflect the Japanese language of the second half of the 19th century. This makes it possible to consider “Ofudesaki” as a valuable source of spoken and literary language of this historical era, as well as the then Kansai dialect, because, despite the poetic form, this work is saturated with colloquial vocabulary and dialectal expressions. Thus, the subject of research is the graphic, phonetic, lexical and syntactic features of “Ofudesaki” text, which reflect not only the idiolect of the author of this sacred work, but also give good reason to make assumptions about the intentional pastiche of this text by Nakayama Miki at almost all language levels. The methods of semantic, grammatical, etymological analysis, as well as historical and descriptive ones are used in the work. One of the main results and substantiated by specific examples study findings is the hypothesis put forward by the author of the article that the convergence of Japanese spoken language with literary language was bidirectional. Not only the language of fiction actively influenced the normative base of the national language through the education system, but also the spoken element had a significant impact on the then Japanese language, “eroding” the limits defined by the literary tradition: changing the pronunciation of words, lexical composition, grammar rules, stylistic norms, and so on.