Pivot word
Pivot word（1899）A History of Japanese Literature, Heinemann, London [EN]
- 201-202But the greatest favourite of all is the “pivot-word,” which is employed in the No to an extent and in a manner previously unknown to Japanese literature
- 202Native critics would no doubt endorse Mr. ChamberIain’s favourable opinion of the pivot-word, and it is undeniable that the Japanese, who are an eminently nimble-witted race, delight in these acrobatic feats of language.
- 298Our old enemy the pivot-word is here, also the pillow-word, and several varieties of the ordinary pun, with various fearfully complicated acrobatic contortions of speech which I shall not attempt to describe.
- 32Another trick of the Japanese poet is what Mr. Chamberlain, Basil Hall has aptly termed “pivot-words.”
- 266Needless to say, pillow-words, pivot-words, and all such frivolous excrescences of style were utterly disdained by them.
- 280A more serious blemish is the abundant use of pivot-words and other meretricious ornaments, which are fatal to coherent sense, and destructive to grammar.
- 288poetical passages of this drama, with their pivot-wordsand closely woven allusive phrases.
- 317They are adorned with the same devices of pillow and pivot words and are in short the old wine in the old bottles.
- 25The link connecting the two subjects being merely the one root word which is common to both, and which is called the pivot word, the value of which is, of course, entirely lost in translation.
- 98In the original the word tsuka means either a “tomb” or a”grasp,” and it acts as a pivot word.
- 25In his Classical Poetry of the Japanese, Prof. Chamberlain, Basil Hall gives an account of the pivot words, and he admires their “dissolving view “effects, but Aston thinks them frivolous and a sign of decadence.
- 25These “pivot words ” as well as the “pillow words,” though they are so prevalent in its literature, are not at all confined to the utai of the No, but are characteristic of the whole of the early Japanese verse.
- 27when the Japanese to be translated is contorted and coruscated with “pillow words” and “pivot words,” with a phrase from an old classical poem of which the reader is supposed to know the whole, and cannot “see the point” unless he does so, what is the translator to do?
- 101The line depends on one of the Japanese “pivot words.”
- 101These lines depend on pivot words, which by playing upon the root words in the Japanese, connect the ideas prettily.
- 93Another bit of word-jugglery is the “pivot-words”
- 21To translate these texts written in the Japanese of long ago, full of poetic allusions and using pivot words and puns, is extremely difficult.