From the source text of the Isoho monogatari Amakusa translation to a reexamination of the hypothesis of an urtext in classical Japanese

In this study I elucidate the fact that, through a correspondence among the fables, the Japanese orthography text and the first volume of the Amakusa text were from a Latin or a Spanish edition based on the late 15th-century Steinhöwel edition in Latin and German, and argue that the second volume of the Amakusa edition was based on the so-called Aesopus Dorpii of the first half of the 16th century. In order to do so, I identify correspondences, not only in the titles of fables, but in the use of words and phrases in the text, and also clarify places in several fables in which creative additions were made to the source text. Through this clarification of the source texts for the translation, a reconsideration of the hypothesis positing an urtext in classical Japanese is called for. It has been nearly a century since the promotion of the hypothesis that the Japanese orthography edition and the Amakusa edition were both based on an urtext written in classical Japanese. Here I reexamine the evidence underlying the urtext hypothesis, and analyze the examples from the Fables found in Rodriguez’s Arte da lingoa de Iapam, from which I identify the existence of a double standard in the accepted notion of a four-element classification system, and thus reject the existence of an urtext.