Abstract
Poetic fragmental sentences such as Haiku are often free from grammatical constraint while maintaining full message transmitting power. The author takes Haiku, a classical Japanese concise poetic sentence, as an elegant and efficient communication language for a digital signal system. By using the functional grammar and season-word ontology, the author will throw light on the secret of efficiency in Haiku-like sentences. It is often said that this efficiency comes from artistic mutism—ellipsis or abbreviation. Various events and situations are narrated in a very short and simple sentence, which is composed of a 5-7-5 pattern of letters, words, or phrases. Haiku-like sentences can be composed in non-Japanese, such as English, French, Chinese, etc. The most important Haiku philosophy is “the universality” (Fueki-Ryukou), which was first told by the great poet Basho in 1689. The benefit of universality is even ranging over the digital communication system. That is, the Haiku-like sentence enables highly efficient and concise communication. You can so much as write a cipher by Haiku.
TopIntroduction
The purpose of this chapter is to provide the readers with the knack of composing a Haiku-like sentence as an elegant and efficient means of communication. Before entering into the details of Haiku-like sentence composition, it may be useful to offer the readers a basic knowledge of Haiku.
This chapter intends to provide readers with a sense of Haiku-like short sentence composition and cultural effects in their daily lives, such as that they can learn a lesson from casual, trifling, ordinary events. This chapter is not a well-designed introduction to composing Haiku; rather a rough sketch of the attractive elements of Haiku. Readers with strong intensions to compose Haiku based on rigid rules are advised to read such books that can be obtained easily at ordinary bookstores. Some of them are listed in the List of References of this chapter.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Kernel Sentence: A unitary simple sentence with a self-explanatory meaning.
Meta-Ontology: A higher concept of ontology that typically defines its structure.
Haiku: Japanese short poem which has definite 17 syllables in 5-7-5 character form. Its origin is the head poem of Renga (linked verse). It has a rule to involve a special functional character Kireji and a season word.
Meta-Sentence: A framework for defining a basic sentence which represents the meaning of said Haiku.
Seasonal Word Ontology (Saijiki, Haiku-Ontology): A book or data-base which is composed of season words and their definitions and explanations on actual usage, together with associated environmental information. Every person may have his/her own ontology in his/her mind.
Functional Grammar: A grammar formalism that regards sentential meaning as a mathematical function, where its arguments are kernel sentences. Its functional behavior is determined by meta-sentence.
Universality of Haiku: The most important Haiku philosophy was told in 1689 by the honorable great poet, Matsuo Basho (????), “Fueki-Ryu-kou” (????), whose word-for-word translation is “Changelessness and Novelty.” The fundamental idea of Haiku is changelessness or eternality while maintaining a strong novelty. Haiku should always pursue something new, which is the source of its eternality. The typical and classical example of Haiku universality can be observed in Basho’s Oku-no-Hosomichi (????).