The most unhinged writing system (Kanbun Explained)

Added: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]Writing has only ever been invented by a culture that didn't know what it was beforehand four times. That means everyone outside of those four cultures had to learn what writing was from one of them directly or through several layers of orthographic incest. For example, you might have seen this chart detailing the Latin alphabet's evolution through various copings and adaptations of existing scripts in a series that goes all the way back to Egyptian hieroglyphs, one of the four spawn points mentioned earlier. Another one of those is the Yellow River Valley, home of the Shang civilization that approximately 1,800 years later would emerge as the Middle Kingdom under the Chin and then Han dynasties. Writing took quite a while to spread out from the core Chinese lands, not emerging in the neighboring divided Korean peninsula until the 3rd century B.C.E., the Korean elite would eventually enthusiastically adopt Hanwriting, making no drastic adaptations until the 15th century. It was during this earlier period of division in Korea that the strange island to their east would be exposed to writing via trade with the continent.

[00:00:55]Initially through ornate pottery and castings of inscribed characters.

[00:00:59]Eventually around the year 500, Japanese scholars would gain fluency in written Chinese via Korean trade contacts and the rest is history. Japanese monks and aristocrats very quickly realized that the grammar of their language and Chinese were completely incompatible and required adjustment in writing. They created new, simpler scripts, made the necessary space for them in sentences, and transitioned to Japanese sov word order at a rapid pace. Oh, who am I kidding? You could probably tell I was lying. Japanese would take centuries to gradually make these changes for a variety of reasons. One is the cultural conformity desired by Chinese sovereigns. Any alterations to Han style writing were seen as insults to the Middle Kingdom. At best, your diplomats would have to deal with a lot of complaining. And at worst, a Chinese army would [ __ ] invade you and destroy every trace of your new writing system. Sinophilia was all the rage in the Japanese court at the time. So altering written Chinese was seen as sacrilege, and the classic texts were maintained in their ancient forms. These conditions, the radical differences between spoken Japanese and literary Chinese, and the walk's unwillingness to alter the contents of classic text, all coalesed to produce the most convoluted natural writing system I'm aware of, called Kung Kundoku. So, how did Kbun actually solve the mismatches in word order and syntax between these two languages? Just a quick background on Chinese and Japanese. The synitic languages encompassing Mandarin, Cantonese, several other regional languages and their shared predecessors are known as isolating analytic languages. That means modifications to nouns, verbs, and adjectives come primarily or exclusively through word order syntax in addition of separate words and sentences rather than elements of the words themselves changing. In English, you would say the cat is not black with five unique base words called morphemss undergoing no modification.

[00:02:44]The Mandarin translation of that phrase involves adding various particles, but the words for cat, black, and is are unchanged. On the other hand, Japanese is a so-called aglutinative language alongside Turkish, Hungarian, Finnish, Filipino, and many others. Grammatical information is mostly carried by directly modifying words, typically with suffixes, such as the ending C, turning adjectives into adverbs, or imasu, changing verbs into their polite form.

[00:03:11]It also places verbs at the end of sentences rather than between subject and object. Cat mouse ate rather than cat ate the mouse. English has both synthetic and analytic elements, but its rigid word order and small number of suffixes make it much more similar to the Chinese system. Let's look at an example. I don't listen to Korean music.

[00:03:36]In Chinese, the negation is communicated with the particle boo before the verb listen. While in Japanese, negation is done with the suffix masen. They fall on opposite sides of their respective sentences and also don't look very similar. But what if we make it look a little bit more archaic [music] and change it to vertical text and delete some of the hiragana and change ma to fu? Now the text we have is the same excluding word order. The crux of Kbun is using annotations to do this conversion from Chinese grammar to the order a Japanese speaker processes language in alongside adding information not conveyed with kanji alone. For a few centuries the glosses used were full kanji characters but the difficulty involved in reading and writing them in such small areas provide the space for innovation. Scribes would omit all but the most distinctive components of characters and over time those shortcuts got roughly standardized producing katakana. In some incarnations, annotation also included adding particles and okurigana inflections which was the origin point of our modern use of kana for writing them. This practice of using annotations to reconfigure a Chinese sentence into semi-understandable Japanese is known as kbong kundoku.

[00:04:45]Kbun means Chinese writing and in English has been adopted as a shorthand term for the practice at large. Kundoku means reading in an adapted Japanese manner. the same kun and kunyomi alongside kunten which refers to the little annotation marks themselves. The kanji itself just means instruction or practice but gained its meaning of Japanese or coino Japanese reading of kanji through those uses in kambun kundoku instructing the reader on how to parse the text. Kunten is the blanket term for all the gloss kan used while kiten are specifically the ones for rearranging word order. Kadakana coincidentally meant reverse, instructing the reader to swap the places of the characters before and following it. Sometimes multiple pairs would be chained together and in that case you'd invert the whole strings order from 1 2 3 to 321. Complenting sets like and up and down 10 in heaven and earth are most commonly just the numerals [music] >> were used to move non-adjacent characters in sentences. Basically, the kanji in each of these sets of counten were in a specific order. Characters marked with them in sentences would interact with each other but not other sets. A character marked with number one would stay in place. Number two would move behind it. And if they were present, then number three and four would follow. These sentences were read top to bottom. So, as long as every ne pair concluded before another began, then the other sets wouldn't need to be used. Most sentences only would use numerals and or deten. It was important which order you did these steps in.

[00:06:19]Generally would come before numerals which would come before up and down.

[00:06:23]Then finally the heavenly symbols.

[00:06:25]Counten would move alongside their associated character rather than staying in place. Doing them out of order could completely mess up the intended structure of the sentence. It's awesome.

[00:06:35]I love needing PMED to read the letters my friend sends me. The last major category of counten are pronunciation guide kana serving the same role as modern food. These would be written top to bottom on the right side while kaiden would be on the kanji's bottom left corner. These were common and sometimes necessary because of the genuinely absurd level of ambiguity that existed regarding pronunciation. If a kanji's intended reading was based on its own yomi, then it could be from multiple different sources in medieval China.

[00:07:04]Canon and go. For pre-existing Japanese words, the lack of any information aside from the kanji itself meant it might represent one of several possible verbs like tabu and ku, aku and hiraku, or god forbid say. It was also just a messy task equating every Japanese word to one specific kanji and scholars disagreed on which character worked best. You could still see the impact of this today in dictionaries. Some words have multiple historic [music] kanji spellings listed since all of those words in middle Chinese might have been seen as the most valid translation by different people.

[00:07:36]It's worth noting that all of these conventions were far from standardized and different monasteries or even scribes within the same institution might have gone about this process completely differently. I was also being a bit misleading for that whole section.

[00:07:48]That Chinese text is a plausible real sentence today, but pre-20th century Japanese scholars wouldn't be familiar with modern registers of Mandarin.

[00:07:56]Instead, for 2,000 years, formal written Chinese was drafted in a style attempting to maintain continuity with the foundational texts of the Chin Han dynasties. This style is known as >> or in English, literary or classical Chinese. In the following centuries, linguistic shifts in spoken Chinese gradually made that style completely unnatural and detached from everyday usage. For scholars in China, classical Chinese became more or less a taught second language, like how old English is completely incomprehensible today and requires dedicated scholarship. For the isolated Japanese, they just chose to keep learning the same outdated variety of that foreign language. Any high school student who's had to read Shakespeare or the Declaration of Independence has experienced firsthand how much a language's style can change in just a few centuries. Compared to later varieties of Chinese, the literary language is a wash in monochar nouns that are very unusual for modern speakers. The language has gone through a lot of phonetic shifts that left individual syllables less distinct. So, dicelabic synonyms have gradually taken over the previous rules of those new homophones. All of this doesn't actually matter that much. It didn't make much of a difference if contemporary or classical Chinese was being taught in Japan. Most of the past thousand years of Japanese history have been periods of selfisolation when a minimal number of actual Chinese speakers would have even been in the country. Either way, you're learning to read and write a foreign language divorced from the spoken tongue without getting engagement from natives.

[00:09:20]Over time, this arrangement shifted more and more toward colloquial Japanese, abandoning many of the more strict formalities and introducing greater native vocabulary and grammar. This produced a gradient spanning centuries of texts faithful to classical Chinese versus once more colloquial. One of the first major liberties taken was the addition of the honorific prefix go/mi using this character which had no basis in literary Chinese. Like any spectrum, pinning down specific boundaries is difficult and has no specific answers.

[00:09:50]Scholars can have a hard time telling if a text is meant to be quote unquote Japanese or quote unquote Chinese. And this confusion might have even applied to the person writing it. Quoting Professor Judith Rabinovich, these fully hybrid styles were seen in their day not as substandard or aberant forms of Chinese, but instead heavily sinusized styles of written Japanese. Indeed, it had by this time become so intertwined with the Japanese idiom that its users were probably not conscious of which elements were Chinese and which were native. The divergence from faithful classical Chinese accelerated after Japan's last embassy to the Tong dynasty in 838 and even more following the instability that followed the Tong collapse in the early 10th century.

[00:10:28]Reduced contact with contemporary Chinese speakers, general isolationism and xenophobia emerging from the Yuan dynasty's attempted conquest all hastened the written languages drift from Chinese. Quoting Professor Ravinovich again, "Composition in Chinese experienced a gradual decline in the Japanese court. From this time on, records, documents, histories, and narratives written in Chinese by Japanese scholars and officials became increasingly interspersed with Japanese words, characters, and phrases. In the course of this development, Kbun eventually emerged as a distinct literary Japanese entity, reaching maturity as a hybrid writing style around the year 1200. It's worth noting that this wasn't the only form of writing in Japan at the time. Court women generally didn't get the full suite of education in both kanji and classical Chinese that men did. So they ended up relying on phonetic kanji to write letters and stories. The cursive employed by them gradually morphed into hiragana and hiragana only writing remained for centuries after that. One important text from the time is the toaniki a narrative diary written entirely in hiragana. Its author was the province's male governor, but by framing the story from a woman's perspective, he was able to write in Kana and discuss Japanese culture on its own terms rather than China's. There also existed styles mixing kana and kanji without annotations in a similar way to modern Japanese as early as the 10th century.

[00:11:49]The tale of Genji is definitely the most notable early example of this. By the start of the Maji period, these styles coexisted with kbun, but not for much longer. The new central government's push for comprehensive mass education included a desire for reading kanji, but expanding that education to accommodate the unnaturalities of conbon was deemed impractical. There was also a lot of popular sentiment against kanji and Chinese culture as a whole since nationalist propaganda painted the two countries as opposites, modern and strong versus backwards and weak.

[00:12:19]Policymakers instead focused their efforts on ironing out the kinson mixed script to make it more closely resemble the spoken language, creating modern Japanese. The major era language reform movement is very fascinating and I have a work in progress script all about it.

[00:12:32]Subscribe if you want to see it within the next uh year. It'll probably take a while. More broadly, Kbun's influence on the development of Japanese across the past 1500 years has been immense and it's still seen as historically significant enough to be a course in some high schools and universities. The gradual shift from plain Chinese to heavily influenced Japanese is the origin of the tens of thousands of cynic loan words still used today. The gradual simplification of counten marks is the main source of kadakana and established kana as the main way of writing particles and inflections. It's also unsurprisingly really important to the history of kanji. The progression from classical Chinese to Chinese but in Japanese word order then to semi-natural Japanese is the source of all the kunyomi used today and a major step in kanji becoming the uniquely Japanese adaptation of Han characters it is today. Something I've been waiting to reveal until now. Kbun style annotations are actually how some texts from European languages including English were first translated called Oloom Kundoku. During the Edeto period, the only European language taught in Japan was Dutch. The first framework for translating texts from it into Japanese was going word by word and then adding conbonesque annotations to rearrange word order. This example in English from the Maji period has four layers for every word. katakana pronunciation, the actual English word, its Japanese translation, and its kiten. Some others use Arabic numerals instead for word order, which is pretty reasonable and I assume still done today in language education. I've just spent the past 14 minutes explaining how convoluted kunoku is. Needing to know another language just so you could write down your own is something so absurd it couldn't happen with any script other than Han characters. That begs the question, why go through all these hurdles to keep writing like that? Kbun didn't die until the early 20th century and its demise was ultimately because it was an artificial and unnecessarily complicated style that would never in a million years be adopted by the newly literate masses. Well, the answer to this lies in the fact that Japanese elites still appreciated dynastic China for being [ __ ] awesome and still saw value in imitating the Middle Kingdom over a thousand years after their last embassy with the Tong. Despite being infamously selfisolated, the Tokugawa Shogun saw greater studies of Confucianism in Chinese history. The cultural foundation laid by the writers and leaders of the Zhao, Chin, and Han dynasties colored an entire continent's way of thinking, and the idea of completely abandoning it wasn't even considered until the modern era. The respect held in Japan for classical Chinese culture persisted through hostilities in the 7th century.

[00:15:03]Two attempted invasions in the 13th, cold relations during the Ming, outright war from 1592 to98, and negligible contact during the Tokugawa shogunit.

[00:15:13]Han characters have always been core to Chinese history and identity, and all the convolution involved in using them and adapting them to other language families will forever be fascinating.

[00:15:21]The world is a more interesting place for it. About the title, I actually started writing this script in December.

[00:15:27]Between then and now, the channel Plastic Heart made a video called the most convoluted writing system ever, describing a somewhat similar arrangement, but with Persian adapting to Aramaic text and also alphabetic instead of logoraphic. I'd still say conbon is more convoluted. There's something so beautiful and absurd about co-Japanese text with multiple completely unclear readings and needing to employ order of operations to parse it. The equivalent classical Chinese gloss system in Korean might have an equal or better claim to that title, but I don't know and I'm not qualified to research it. Thank you for watching and especially for my $4 a month patrons, Ivo Voidworm and David Kadich. That looks like a Slavic name that would have the accented C at the end, but if it's not and it really is Kadic or Kadic, then please correct me. Also, Garnavis, who subscribed on Wednesday, days after I finished recording, but before I finished editing, so I had to add this in after the fact. This was a difficult script to write. I did about 40% back in December and January and just picked back up this month. Finishing a partially completed, very scatterbrained script is harder than starting from scratch with a clear vision in a lot of ways. I also was limited by sources.

[00:16:32]There just aren't that many good resources in English online about condomin. There were a lot of gaps in my understanding and in order to solve those and make the script flow better, I had to research hours upon hours for some sections that were important but not actually that long. I don't even remember where I learned about it being used to translate English, but none of the English websites I used mention it.

[00:16:51]I had to rely heavily on the Google Books preview of Frellis's A History of the Japanese Language alongside a paid article that my sister downloaded for me with her university account. Regardless, I think it's come out well and I believe I can say this is the most detailed video on English YouTube about conbon.

[00:17:06]Thank you for watching. I had to have a great