Another Japanese question! My Mizoguchi retrospective reached 1954 and Sansho the Bailiff, which I’d somehow managed never to see, and I was as impressed as I’d expected to be — Kinuyo Tanaka is as resplendent as ever, and the ending is powerfully moving. But I’m here to ask about the title, the original of which, 山椒大夫, is universally transliterated Sanshō Dayū (and in fact the movie is so known in many languages, and according to Wikipedia in the United Kingdom and Ireland). Imagine my surprise, when I went to look up the word translated as ‘bailiff,’ to find that it’s actually /tajuː/! What’s going on here?
A separate question is why it’s rendered ‘bailiff,’ which doesn’t seem to equate very well to any of the meanings listed at Wiktionary, like “high ranked courtier, particularly officers in the 5th rank (五位)” and “head of shoku(職) or bō(坊), administrative departments of the imperial court,” but since we’re talking about positions that have long ago fallen into desuetude (and for which, unlike “active privy councillor” for действительный тайный советник, there is no time-honored English rendering), there’s no point trying to be too exact. And I see from the OED (1885 entry) that there’s a sense “Used as the English form of the title of various foreign magistrates; e.g. the French bailli, and German Landvogt,” so maybe it’s a good rendering after all.
Update. It turns out that in the title of 祇園囃子/Gion Bayashi/A Geisha, the “bayashi” is actually hayashi, which proves DM’s suggestion that what’s going on is rendaku across word boundaries, which I didn’t know was a thing. So Gion Bayashi is just like Nihonbashi = Nihon + hashi, except that it’s written as two words, just for the sake of confusion. They could at least put a hyphen in there…
Rendaku across word boundaries? (Or are they…?)
That looks like a cross of Wirklicher Hofrat* and the older Geheimrat.
* Like my grandpa – who was born well after there was a court, so there’s nothing “real” or for that matter “active” about it.
I defer to whoever knows Japanese and has inevitably finished posting before me, but I’ll also make a fool of myself by posting on the basis of the Mandarin I’ve been studying, which would have given you the same question:
In English the pair ta/da is distinguished by voicing, and we have rules about when to aspirate our consonants that make you have a Russian or other accent if you forget them.
In Mandarin, the pair Pinyin calls ta/da is distinguished by aspiration, but it’s easy for English speakers to stop aspirating the “d” if they voice it, not just because that’s how our rules go, but also because of voice mechanics.
So I highly suspect that the D that’s secretly a T is another one that shouldn’t be aspirated, but doesn’t have to be voiced.
山椒大夫
ShānJiāoDàFù (Hanyu Pinyin)
Shan1-Chiao1-Ta4-Fu4 (Wade-Giles)
according to Wikipedia in the United Kingdom and Ireland—the source cited by Wikipedia is spectacularly unconvincing. It’s a DVD company whose “four co-founders … were spread around the world (Canada, USA, and the UK)” and its offering of the film is “Sansho dayu (1954), aka Sansho the Bailiff,”.
Japanese doesn’t do aspiration; it has a real voice contrast like French, Italian or Russian. Aside from the tons upon tons of loanwords, it’s a language very much unlike any kind of Chinese.
My copy of 山椒大夫 came with 祇園囃子 Gion Bayashi as a sort of “B” side. I’d very much recommend it if you haven’t already seen it. Indeed, I’d very much recommend it if you have already seen it.
OP:
I read that Sanshō was the administrator of a private estate. Wiktionary’s sense 3:
(I guess steward might work as well.)
祇園囃子 Gion Bayashi
Known as A Geisha in English, apparently; I’d love to see it, but it doesn’t seem to be available in my part of the universe.
It’s at the ‘Tube. Archive Dotorg has it (perhaps at a slightly lower quality) and 26 more Mizoguchi movies, here.
Wiktionary’s sense 3—of “bailiff” rather than “dayū”. Other dictionaries mark this sense as British rather than historical. So maybe “steward” would have worked better in America.
What sort of name is Sanshō, by the way? Google translate wants the literal meaning to be “Mountain Pepper” (and just “Pepper” if I swith to Chinese). Does it invoke that sense in Japanese, and if so, is that relevant for the character?
(Also, with dayū coming from a Chinese title literally meaning “big man”, we could have a multi-macaronic pun on Sancho Panza. Not that that would add anything to the understanding.)
Over the course of time, the imported Norman lexeme “bailiff” came to take over a lot of the various roles/offices previously occupied by the good old local word “reeve,” which descended from Anglo-Saxon “ġerēfa” and may or may not (there seems to be a dispute …) be cognate with the modern German “Graf.” Farther north the /g/ survived in the sense of the noun “grieve” glossed by wiktionary as “(chiefly Scotland) A manager or steward, e.g. of a farm.” One of my great-great-great-grandfathers was supposedly employed as grieve on an estate a bit northeast of Inverness.
It’s at the ‘Tube
Thanks, I didn’t even think to check!
Grieve at DSL (“A good Grieve is better than an ill Worker”).
I just watched an interview with Tokuzō Tanaka, who was the 1st AD on the movie, and he said Mizoguchi was very dissatisfied with it because he wanted to concentrate on Sansho and the slave system but the studio forced him to focus more on the brother and sister. Shades of Tolstoy and Anna Karenina, which he only wrote so he could include the stuff on Levin and agriculture that most readers skim impatiently!
I like the DSL’s usage example from R.L. Stevenson (“His grieve, that had been his right hand in many a left-hand business”)!
In the interest of precision,
山椒大夫
is probably
ShānJiāoDàiFū (Hanyu Pinyin)
Shan1-Chiao1-Tai4-Fu1 (Wade-Giles)
with the final Fu possibly reduced to a neutral (unstressed) tone
I just watched 祇園囃子/Gion Bayashi/A Geisha — thanks to DE for recommending it and to Y for providing the means to see it! It’s not one of Mizoguchi’s best — it’s basically a fairly implausible morality tale designed to illustrate the climactic line from Sisters of the Gion “I wish there were no such thing as geishas!” — but Tolstoy would have loved it, and it was fascinating to see such a detailed presentation of the training and lives of geishas (a subject of intense interest to Mizoguchi, of course).
Incidentally, I realized that the “bayashi” of the title is actually hayashi, which presents the same problem as the dayu/tayu one I was asking about.
Glad to help! Are you going to watch the other movies at archive.org?
You bet! I keep forgetting they have so many movies.
Oh! Yes! I was actually taught 大夫 as dàifu: retained dài instead of the usual dà, but neutral tone on the fu.
(“Great master”; nowadays used for “medical doctor” – not the academic title, which is unrelated.)
Ah, rendaku it is, then, with all its lexicalized irregularities.
The “reeve” connection I’ve seen is that it ended up in “sheriff”.
Thanks to everyone who has corrected, expanded, clarified, refuted my previous. =)
Romanisation of titles using a different approach to word boundaries than the language itself shows when it comes to things like rendaku doesn’t bother me, but I am intrigued by the たいふ → たゆう reading change. Wiktionary implies it’s linked to particular meanings, but it’s not obvious how the use in this story fits in.
Sanshō Dayū
山椒大夫
Dr. Pepper!
I’m watching the movie with the commentary track by Jeffrey Angles, and he says “dayu is something appended to many male names in early Japanese history” (he goes on to add that it’s usually rendered “bailiff” or “steward” by translators). I thought that was interesting enough to share; Angles is not only a scholar of Japanese literature but has won the Yomiuri Prize for his book of his own Japanese-language poetry, so I figure he knows what he’s talking about.
Angles also points out that the plot line of the father’s banishment for taking the side of the peasants in his province was added by Mizoguchi — in the source material he’s banished for some unnamed transgression — and is quite implausible for Heian-era Japan, but it is because of that change that the movie acquires its emotional power (and won international acclaim for being on the side of democracy and human rights).
Angles says the name Sanshō probably derives from an earlier Sanjō, distorted by being passed down through oral tradition.
A good NY Times review (Dec. 17, 1969) by Roger Greenspun of a rerelease, when it was titled The Bailiff.
大夫 is tayū when used as an independant noun, but as a title attached to a name, it usually switches to a voiced form -dayū. So Sanshō-dayū is a tayū. You encounter a similar shift with 殿 which as noun for a feudal ruler is tono but as title is -dono. It might be the trace of an old postposition, like other instances of rendaku: Old japanese voiced stops were prenasalised, so a reduced syllable with a nasal consonant could trigger the voicing of the following consonant: pudibara-no-tono (the lord of Fujiwara) > *pudibara-ntono > fujiwara-dono
The same rendaku is probably responsible for the shift of たいふ to たゆう noticed by Jonathan D in wiktionary. First I should note that this is a shift in spelling. Traditional japanese spelling didn’t distinguish between voiced and voiceless consonants, so たいふ could stand for daifu, daiwu (< older daibu), taifu and taiwu (< older taibu), the later of which would have evolved to taiu (loss of /w/ before most vowel) then to tayū (resolving vowel hyatuses by turning one of them into a glide, but preserving mora count by lengthening the resulting syllable)
The reading “taifu” in other meanings is more recent and obtained by using the usual sino-japanese reading of each character of 大夫.
Wow, thanks very much for that!