Measuring linguistics of the wokototen chart made inductively by deciphering kunten materials

In this paper, we focus on wokototen markings, which are a system of kunten annotations used to facilitate the reading of classical Chinese documents by Japanese readers. Using digitized data, we performed basic measurements of wokototen by using a chart that summarizes the wokototen markings of actual kunten materials described by Hiroshi Tsukishima, and we quantitatively clarified their characteristics. Kunten materials are classical Chinese books with annotations, called kunten, on the Chinese text. The wokototen is a type of kunten. In ancient East Asian countries, kunten systems were developed as a way of directly annotating Chinese documents so that they could be read and understood by non-native readers. For this reason, kunten materials and kunten are treated as historical sources for linguistic and historical research. The shape and position of a wokototen marking determines what kind of reading it indicates. The results of our basic survey quantitatively show that almost all the wokototen charts in actual kunten materials contain particles represented by “te”, “ni”, and “wo”, the most common shapes of wokototen are dots and shapes that can be written with a single stroke, such as ｜, ─, and ＼, and that the most common places to find these markings are to the right of characters in the horizontal direction and below characters in the vertical direction.