Code-Switching on Paper: How Japan “Hacked” Classical Chinese

Imagine for a moment that for the next thousand years, the official written language of the English-speaking world is Latin. Laws, poetry, and history are all written in Latin. However, when you read it aloud—in court, in a classroom, or to your children—you do not speak Latin sentences. Instead, you look at the Latin words, mentally strictly rearrange them, swap out vocabulary, and read them aloud as perfectly grammatical English.

This sounds like an impossible cognitive feat, a linguistic tightrope walk performed without a net. Yet, this is exactly what Japanese scholars, monks, and bureaucrats did for centuries. They took Classical Chinese (Wényán), a language with a structure entirely alien to their own, and developed a “source code” to compile it into Japanese in real-time.

This system is called Kanbun Kundoku (漢文訓読). It is one of the most fascinating examples of code-switching in human history—a manual algorithm deployed to bridge two incompatible linguistic worlds.

The Great Mismatch: SVO vs. SOV

To understand why this system was necessary, we have to look at the structural chasm between Chinese and Japanese. Historically, they are not related languages. They sit on completely different branches of the linguistic family tree.

Classical Chinese is generally an SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) language. Like English, the verb usually comes before the object. It is also an isolating language, meaning words generally don’t change form (no conjugation); grammar is determined by word order and context.

Japanese, on the other hand, is an SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) language. The verb must wait until the very end of the sentence. Furthermore, Japanese is agglutinating. It relies heavily on “particles”—small grammatical tags attached to words to indicate if they are the subject, object, or topic—and complex verb conjugations.

Here is a simplified example of the conflict using English words:

• Chinese Logic: [Person] [Eats] [Fish]
• Japanese Logic: [Person] [Fish] (object marker) [Eat]

If a Japanese speaker reads Chinese characters in their original order, the sentence sounds nonsensical to their native syntax. To solve this, Japan didn’t just borrow the words; they invented a notation system to scramble them back into place.

The Hack: Return Marks and Annotations

The solution was Kanbun Kundoku, literally “Japanese reading of Chinese writing.” To the untrained eye, a Kanbun text looks like standard Chinese characters (Kanji). However, closer inspection reveals tiny marks scribbled next to the characters. These are the “cheat codes” of the system.

There are two main components to this system:

1. Kaeriten (Return Marks)

These are small diacritics placed at the bottom-left corner of a character that instruct the reader to skip a character and return to it later. They function essentially like “GOTO” commands in computer programming.

• Re-ten (レ): The “V” shape. It tells the reader to swap the order of the two adjacent characters. If you see A-レ-B, you read B, then A. This deftly handles the Verb-Object flip.
• One-Two-Three Marks (一, 二, 三): These are used for longer jumps. You read all the characters marked “One”, then jump back to the character marked “Two”, and so on.

2. Okurigana (Sending Kana)

Since Chinese characters represent meaning but don’t usually show grammatical function (like past tense or prepositions), the Japanese added small phonetic characters (Katakana) next to the Kanji. These supplied the grammatical glue—the particles (wa, ga, o) and verb endings—that Chinese lacked but Japanese required.

Deconstructing a Sentence

Let’s look at how this works in practice. Suppose we have the Chinese sentence: “Drink Tea” (飲茶).

In Classical Chinese, this is ordered Verb (Drink/飲) -> Object (Tea/茶).

A Japanese reader wants to read this as “Tea [object marker] Drink.” In Japanese, “Drink” is nomu and “Tea” is cha.

If written purely in Chinese characters (飲茶), a Japanese speaker might mistakenly read it as “Nomu Cha” (Drink Tea), which sounds like broken Japanese. So, they apply the Re-ten:

飲_レ 茶

The reading process becomes an algorithm:

1. Look at the first character (飲). See the Re-ten (レ). This signals “Skip me for now.”
2. Look at the next character (茶). Read it: “Cha.”
3. Add the invisible (or implied) object particle “o”.
4. The Re-ten completes freely now. Return to the skipped character (飲). Read it: “Nomu.”

The output is “Cha o Nomu.” The visual input was Chinese order, but the spoken output was perfect Japanese syntax.

The Korean Connection: Gugyeol

Japan wasn’t the only nation trying to force the square peg of Chinese grammar into a round hole. Korea faced the exact same problem. Like Japanese, Korean is an SOV, agglutinating language. And like Japan, Korea used Classical Chinese as its literary standard for centuries.

Korean scholars developed a system called Gugyeol (口訣). Much like the Japanese Okurigana, Gugyeol involved inserting simplified characters between the original Chinese characters to mark grammatical particles (like eun, neun, yi, ga) and verb endings.

There were two methods of doing this:

1. Interpretive Gugyeol: Similar to Kanbun Kundoku, the reader would mentally rearrange the Chinese sentence into Korean word order (SOV).
2. Consecutive Gugyeol: The reader would read the Chinese text in the original SVO order but insert Korean particles to clarify the relationships between words.

Interestingly, some linguists theorize that the simplified characters used in Gugyeol may have influenced the development of Japanese Katakana, hinting at a cross-cultural exchange of linguistic “hacking” tools across the Sea of Japan.

The Legacy: Why Does This Matter?

You might ask: Why didn’t they just translate it and write it down in Japanese word order to begin with?

The answer lies in prestige and standardization. Classical Chinese was the Lingua Franca of East Asia. Writing in the Chinese style allowed a Japanese intellectual to communicate with a Korean or Vietnamese intellectual, even if they couldn’t speak a word to one another. The characters carried meaning independent of sound.

However, the legacy of Kanbun Kundoku is heavy. It is the reason modern Japanese has two distinct ways of reading almost every Kanji:

• On-yomi: The sound-based reading (an approximation of the original Chinese sound).
• Kun-yomi: The meaning-based reading (the native Japanese word applied to the character).

When the Japanese scholars used Kundoku, they were essentially cementing the Kun-yomi—mapping a native Japanese word onto a foreign symbol. This duality makes Japanese one of the most complex writing systems in the modern world.

Today, Kanbun is still taught in Japanese high schools. Students learn to decipher the re-ten and kaeriten just as their ancestors did over a millennium ago. It serves as a reminder of a time when Japan imported a civilization’s worth of philosophy, religion, and law, and—rather than being overwhelmed by it—engineered a brilliant, complex system to make it their own.