大胆不敵 daitan futeki Fearless
This is a philological study of the Japanese word 大胆不敵 (daitan futeki), fearless. It spans the record from the compound's appearance in the 1563 玉塵抄 to Hepburn's English equation of 1867, and examines how a phrase built from two Chinese words that Chinese never joined became a Japanese word that praises nerve on both sides of the law.
Abstract
大胆不敵, daitan futeki, is a four-character Japanese compound built from two words Chinese never joined: 大胆, having the nerve most people lack, and 不敵, which in Chinese names the loser of a fight but which Japanese had turned, by the time of the Tale of Hōgen (c. 1220), into treating no one as a rival. The compound is on record from 1563, was spoken on Chikamatsu's stage and in Kyōden's print, and had appeared in over nine hundred prewar books by the mid-twentieth century. It praises nerve on both sides of the law, and Hepburn's fearless of 1867 is the oldest English the word has had.
Overview
The sense. Spoken Japanese since the 1560s, the popular stage and popular fiction; praise of nerve, shading into insolence. Put together, 大胆不敵 is having nerve and knowing no fear, and the dictionary of four-character idioms illustrates it twice: once with a burglar who dozes off in the bed he has just robbed, once with students who break the rules [1]. The word praises nerve, and it praises it on both sides of the law. English fearless is the absence of fear, audacious is fearlessness that oversteps, bold sits between, dauntless holds under pressure; the Japanese word covers all four.
The words. 大胆 is having the nerve to do what ordinary people fear to do, and, in its second sense, being thick-skinned about it [2]. 不敵 is the word that gives the compound its history [3]. In Chinese the two characters mean no match for: an army whose strength 不敵 is the one that loses and runs [4]. The Japanese dictionaries head the word the other way, so strong that no one can stand against you, and then bold and fearless, or violent and lawless; the shortest modern gloss is not treating an enemy as an enemy [3]. The bridge between the two languages is a line of the Xunzi that the national dictionary cites, with a might that nothing can match, where the unmatched one is the winner [3]; Japanese kept that reading, unrivaled, and turned it inward into fearing no rival. A Meiji dictionary of 1896 still lists both senses side by side, bold, fearless; daring, rude, audacious and matchless, unrivalled [5].
The text in English. The English of this design is the oldest there is. The English index of Hepburn's first Japanese dictionary (1867) has one Japanese word under FEARLESS, and it is futeki [6]. His fourth edition, of 1888, reads fearless; bold; having no fear of man; daring; audacious (always in a bad sense), and gives the compound as its example for 大胆 [7]. Brinkley (1896) is the first to render the four characters as a unit, very bold; extraordinarily audacious or impudent, with the sentence a bold and audacious fellow [5]. Saitō (1928) has audacious; daring; presumptuous and Confound his audacity!; the current Kenkyūsha has fearless; undaunted; dauntless; audacious [8][9].
The historical record
Not Chinese. The four characters are Japanese, not Chinese. The Chinese Text Project returns nothing for them in the whole post-Han corpus [10], and its hits for 大膽 alone are nearly all the Ming novel Journey to the West [11]; the older Chinese idiom for a big heart is the gall bladder as big as a peck measure that was found in the general Jiang Wei when he was cut open [12].
The 11th century, and about 1220, the Tale of Hōgen. In Japan 不敵 arrives first in its Chinese sense, in an eleventh-century letter-writing manual [3], and has turned by the time the Tale of Hōgen (c. 1220) draws its great archer Minamoto no Tametomo: from childhood he was 不敵, deferred to no elder brother, and behaved as if no one else existed, so his father sent him off to Kyushu at thirteen; the 1913 editor read here glosses the word as 大胆 [13].
1563. A Zen monk's lecture-notes. The compound is on record by 1563, in a Zen monk's lecture-notes, as a word people already used: people call a game man a daitan-futeki-mono [1].
1715. Chikamatsu, The Battles of Coxinga. Chikamatsu put it on the puppet stage in 1715, in The Battles of Coxinga, where the old father presents his son to the Ming princess: big-boned as you see, born daitan futeki and a man of great strength; he will restore the Ming once more [14].
1813. Santō Kyōden's illustrated novel. Santō Kyōden's illustrated novel of 1813, read here at the print, has a lone rider who resolves to ride into the enemy camp and pick off its general, a daitan futeki thing to do [15].
Bakin, and the Yotsuya ghost story. Bakin uses it of bandits and villains as readily as of heroes [16]; the villain of the Yotsuya ghost story is by nature a daitan futeki man [17].
1873. Fukuzawa's An Encouragement of Learning. Fukuzawa, in the third part of An Encouragement of Learning (December 1873), uses it of foreigners as the timid Japanese townsman meets them: no wonder such minions of the god of cowardice have the gall knocked out of them when they meet those daitan futeki foreigners [18].
By the 1920s. By then it was a stock word of kabuki scripts, storytellers' histories and Meiji novels; the local archive of prewar books returns over nine hundred that use it, rising decade by decade to the 1920s, and three Meiji dictionaries define 不敵 by quoting the compound [19][20][21].
Today. Japanese today sends the word back the other way: Japanese Wikipedia renders General Patton's motto Be audacious! with it, glosses the French destroyer L'Audacieux with it, and titles the Hindi film Dabangg with it; the word appears in nearly five hundred of its articles [22]. The house's Fearless is Hepburn's equation of 1867, and its gloss fearless; daring; audacious keeps the edge, which a rendering must: fearless alone is the hero's half [6].
A reading
The word is Japanese, old and deep. Its two halves are Chinese, but Chinese never joined them, and its 不敵 names the loser of a fight, while Japanese had made the same two characters mean a man who treats no one as his match by the time it drew Tametomo. That sense fixed the compound in the mouths of the 1560s, on Chikamatsu's stage, in Kyōden's print and in a thousand prewar books, and it is the sense Hepburn met when he set futeki under FEARLESS. So fearless is exact, and it is the first English the word ever had. What a buyer should feel is the edge. This is not the stillness of 不動心 or the virtue of 勇気; it is nerve, and Japanese has always used it of the burglar and the rebel as readily as of the hero, which is why Hepburn thought it always in a bad sense, why Brinkley added impudent, and why the modern dictionaries illustrate it with a thief asleep in a stranger's bed. A person who wears 大胆不敵 is saying I fear no one, with the swagger the words have carried since a puppet general said them of his son.
References
- 「大胆不敵」, デジタル大辞泉・精選版日本国語大辞典・四字熟語を知る辞典, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/大胆不敵-557761
- 「大胆」, デジタル大辞泉・精選版日本国語大辞典・字通, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/大胆-557758
- 「不敵」, デジタル大辞泉・精選版日本国語大辞典・字通, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/不敵-619585
- 不敵, moedict (Chinese) · zdic. https://www.moedict.tw/raw/不敵 · https://www.zdic.net/hans/不敵
- Brinkley, An Unabridged Japanese-English Dictionary, Sanseido, Tokyo, 1896, pp. 159, 228.
- Hepburn, A Japanese and English Dictionary, American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1867, index p. 34.
- Hepburn, A Japanese-English and English-Japanese Dictionary, fourth edition, Z. P. Maruya, Tokyo, 1888, p. 102. Internet Archive japaneseenglishe00hepbuoft. https://archive.org/details/japaneseenglishe00hepbuoft
- 斎藤和英大辞典, at Weblio 英和・和英辞典. https://ejje.weblio.jp/content/大胆不敵
- 研究社『新和英中辞典』, at Weblio 英和・和英辞典. https://ejje.weblio.jp/content/大胆不敵
- Chinese Text Project, post-Han corpus search, 大膽不敵. https://ctext.org/post-han?searchu=大膽不敵
- Chinese Text Project, post-Han corpus search, 大膽. https://ctext.org/post-han?searchu=大膽
- Chinese Text Project, post-Han corpus search, 膽大. https://ctext.org/post-han?searchu=膽大
- 鳥野幸次 (ed.), 保元物語評釈, 1913, scan 46, p. 55. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/925166/1/46
- 饗庭篁村 (ed.), 近松時代浄瑠璃集, 1896, scan 33, p. 45. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1883014/1/33
- 山東京伝, 双蝶記, 1813, scan 14. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2554013/1/14
- 滝沢馬琴, 南総里見八犬伝, scan 25. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/879352/1/25
- 四ツ谷雑談 (今古実録), 1884, scan 18. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/882268/1/18
- 福沢諭吉, 学問のすすめ, 三編, 1873, at Aozora Bunko. https://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/000296/files/47061_29420.html
- 山田美妙, 日本大辞書, 1893, scan 639. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/902835/1/639
- 藤井乙男・草野清民, 帝国大辞典, 1896, scan 628. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2387590/1/628
- 落合直文, ことばの泉, 1898, scan 423. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/862875/1/423
- Japanese Wikipedia, full-text search, 大胆不敵. https://ja.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=%22大胆不敵%22&ns0=1&fulltext=1