The purpose of this page is to provide a very simple guide to some of the grammar and constructions found in Japanese haiku, for those who can maybe bluff their way in modern Japanese on a good day but don't have the inclination to become poetry experts.

Unfortunately almost all Japanese poetry is either genuinely written in old Japanese, or looks as if it were. This guide therefore might be useful for answering questions such as:

• When it says 「歌ふ」is that the same as 「歌う」 and do I pronounce the 'h'?
• When it says 「ありけり」, is that part of the verb 'aru' or what?

For the purposes of this discussion, Japanese linguistic history is divided into two periods: 'old' and 'modern'. Heian period Japanese, medieval Japanese, Edo period Japanese and anything before 1945 are all all 'old'. So is Yukio Mishima. Everything else is 'modern'.

TODO: finish and add examples.

Orthography

One annoying fact that confronts the would-be expert is that Japanese spelling was quite different before 1946. There is a lot to be said about the evolution of kana usage over the years, but luckily it can be summed up in a few crass generalizations:

Rule 0: 'tefu tefu' is not a word

「てふてふ」(tefutefu) is NOT the old word for butterfly! It's always been pronounced 「ちょうちょう」(chou-chou) from the hanzi 「蝶蝶」. It's just that in very old hiragana usage, it can be written so that it looks like 'tefutefu'.

I realize that 'tefutefu' has a beautiful butterfly-like sound, whereas 'chou-chou' has a clumsy one, but unfortunately there is actually no such word as 'tefutefu'. When you see it in a poem, pronounce it 'chou-chou' or be laughed at.

Rule 1: Long vowels got an extra 'h' which you can ignore.

Sometimes (but not every time) old Japanese has an extra h in the middle of a long vowel. Thus if you see うふ, it could be just a long 'u' sound, and おほ could be a long 'o' sound.

The first vowel in the pair may also mutate randomly for no reason -- if the first written vowel in a long vowel isn't making sense, it probably needs to be turned into a modern Japanese 'o' or 'u'.

Rule 2: Verb endings also got an extra 'h' which you can ignore.

Where the verb ending joins the verb, there's often an extra 'h' which you can ignore.

Rule 3: The beginning of the word got an extra 'h'

When a word in old Japanese spelling begins with ひ, へ, or ほ, then it's really い, え, or お. Sometimes.

Because of rules 1, 2 and 3, it's often worth mentally 'de-H-ing' a sentence before trying to read it -- and certainly before trying to look it up in your Wordtank. They really loved their H's back in the Heian Period, is what it comes down to.

Rule 4: 'wi' and 'we' are exactly equivalent to 'i' and 'e'.

ゐ and ヰ can just be turned into い. ゑ and ヱ can just be turned into え. を and ヲ, if they occur in a word other than the actual word を, can just be turned into お. Problem solved. That one's easy.

Rule 5: There were no small versions of the kana

There were no ゃぇゅぃょ or っ in old Japanese. You might think, therefore, that lots of ambiguity would arise between 「きょう」 and 「きよう」 and so on -- and you would be right. Luckily, dictionary order is such that this doesn't stop you looking thing up in your Wordtank. Praise be!

You have now learnt everything useful about old Japanese orthography.

The most important rule is rule 0.

Kireji

Haiku have a caesura -- that is, a place where there is a natural pause essential to the rhythm of the verse. In theory, 切れ字 (kireji) are the words that signal this pause. In practise, they're sometimes just used to fill up space.

The ubiquitous 'ya'

This occurs at the end of the first line and has no semantic payload, it just uses up a beat. Yes, a beat, you do not count haiku in syllables, no matter what less-literate Japanese people may tell you. You count them in はく (haku) or モーラ (morae). That's an important fact if you want to actually read haiku.

The word や, however, is not particularly important. It originally suggested a question, like 'ka'. Then it took on the connotation of surprise, as in 'what it that that I have seen? Can it be a pond?!?' Then it completely lost all meaning.

The unavoidable 'kana'

This word actually has a kanji (哉) so if you see that kanji at the end of a haiku, you can ignore it. 'Kana' is supposed to give the impression of regret or longing but like 'ya' it's basically used to fill up space.

Since it always appears at the end of the haiku, it can't really be a 'pause' in the haiku, can it? There's actually a rational explanation for that, but this article is too limited to contain it.

The frequently-seen 'keri'

'Kana' might be a pretty annoying kireji, since it appears at the end of the haiku and can't really 'cut' anything, but 'keri' is a thousand times more annoying!

First, like 'kana' it appears at the end.

Second, it's not even a word! It's a modal auxiliary, more a verb suffix than a word in it's own right. Pathetic.

Semantically, 'keri' is like 'kana', in that it imparts a sense of regret. Unlike 'kana' it retains a little bit of actual meaning. We will meet it again in the Verbs section of this article.

Verbs, the superheroes of Old Japan

Modern Japanese is quite a 'verby' language. Verbs carry a good amount of weight in most sentences. There is a robust system of inflections and auxiliaries, and there's the excellent compound verb system. Good.

In old Japanese, verbs were eight times more expressive -- maybe even more. Unfortunately explaining the old verb system is beyond the scope of this article (also, I would get it hopelessly wrong). I'd give a link here, but unfortunately this is the kind of thing for which you need a book. A big, difficult book.

Anyway, there are many verb forms that you will meet in older poetry that require a brief explanation. You'll also see some of them in modern tanka poetry -- not so much in haiku. Here are some important old verb forms:

-keri again.

Compound suffixes

In modern Japanese, you can create long chains of verbs like 行きたくなくなり始まりたがりそう or something, but really all you're doing (aside from speaking terrible Japanese, obviously) is chaining together auxiliary verbs, each of which only has one actual grammatical suffix on the end.

Classical Japanese had a fearsomely powerful system whereby actual suffixes could be stacked up on each other, and certain derived verb forms became pseudo-root verbs which could then be declined in their own right -- ooh, it must have been such fun! If you see a verb with more hiragana after it than it should have, that's probably what's going on.

If it's actual classical Japanese you're not going to figure it out but if it's modern tanka, you might. Eventually.

-mai

-beshi

-ba and it's friends

Prepositions, conjunctions, suffixes

-domo

-goto