夢が叶う yume ga kanau Dreams Come True
This is a philological study of the Japanese sentence 夢が叶う (yume ga kanau), a dream comes true. Its verb is Heian, its noun's modern sense of hope is Taishō, and the sentence itself is absent from the public-domain corpus entirely, arriving only in the postwar decades it does not reach; the history examines why the youngest sentence of its kind is also the one a Japanese speaker says every day.
Abstract
夢が叶う, yume ga kanau, is a modern Japanese sentence, said every day, joining 夢, a dream in the sense of a hope, and 叶う, comes true. The verb is old in both its senses; 夢 as a hope is a Taishō-era sense, first cited in 1914; the sentence itself is in no book of the public-domain corpus, which ends where this sentence begins. It needs no source and should not be given a false one: it is simply what the language now says.
Overview
The sense. The verb, under 適う with 叶う as its wish-spelling; the sentence only as an example. Not Chinese. The dictionaries head the verb 適う and give 叶う to this sense: 大辞泉 defines it 思いどおりに実現する。願っていたことがそのとおりになる, to come about as one wished, with 念願が叶う and 叶わぬ恋 as its examples [1].
The words. 夢 yume, older ime, is the dream of sleep [2]. 叶う kanau is old in both its senses, fit and come about as one wished [1]. The character 叶 itself is the old form of 協, to accord; it is not on the 常用 list but on the 人名用 one, and it is what people write [3].
The text in English. Dreams come true rises in English from the 1880s, surges in the 1910s and 1920s and peaks in the 2010s; capitalized, as a title, it peaks around 1930, and make your dreams come true is in print from 1895 [4]. In Japan the English phrase is a household name in its own right: DREAMS COME TRUE, the band of 吉田美和 and 中村正人, whom everyone calls ドリカム, and the Japanese sentence and the English title have carried each other since [5]. The example corpora now render dreams come true as 夢が叶う, 夢はかないます and 夢が実現する; the house's title Dreams Come True is the ordinary equivalent and needs no footnote.
The historical record
The 万葉集, and Ono no Komachi. 夢 is the dream of sleep, in the 万葉集 and in Ono no Komachi's 思ひつつぬればや人のみえつらん夢としりせばさめざらましを, had I known it was a dream I would not have woken [2].
1914, Kinoshita Mokutarō. The sense the sentence carries, a thing one hopes to bring about, is the youngest in the 日本国語大辞典's entry: its first citation is Kinoshita Mokutarō's play 常長 of 1914, 世は移って、ああ、わが夢も消えたぞ, the world has changed, and ah, my dream too is gone [2].
The 万葉集, the 古今集, and the 落窪物語. For fit 叶う is in the 万葉集's eighth poem, 潮も可奈比ぬ, the tide too has come right; for come about as one wished it is in the 古今集 (命だに心にかなふ物ならば, if even life obeyed the heart) and, standing alone with が as here, in the 落窪物語, その夜思ひ臥したりし本意の、皆かなひたるかな, what I lay hoping that night has all come true, and in the 徒然草 [1].
The 1070s, 狭衣物語. The sentence has almost none, and the absence is the history. The Diet Library's corpus of public-domain books, which runs to the middle of the twentieth century, has 夢が叶う in no book, nor 夢が叶ふ, 夢がかなう, 夢がかなふ, 夢は叶う or 夢の叶う. What the corpus has for 夢 with 叶う is older and other: the 狭衣物語 of the 1070s, その御夢かなふには, where the dream that comes true is an omen dream of sleep [6].
1825, and the sentence Japanese did say. The corpus is not failing, for it has 願ひが叶ふ in 142 books, 願が叶ふ in 193 and 望みが叶ふ in 135, from an 1825 novel onward (時雨の袖: そなたが年頃の願ひが叶ふて, your long-held wish has come true). What Japanese said, when a hope came true, was that a 願い or a 望み had [7].
1915, and 1916, the new sense in translation. The new sense arrives in translation. Tolstoy's Princess Marya, in 島村抱月's War and Peace of 1916, hopes 禁ぜられたこの世の夢の叶ふことを, that her forbidden worldly dream might come true [8]; 馬場孤蝶 the year before had written the same clause 夢の協ふ [9].
Today. Between the wars the language preferred the noun: 夢の実現 is in 181 books from 1904, 夢を実現 in 409. 夢が叶う as a spoken sentence belongs to the postwar decades, and the corpus that would show it arriving is still in copyright.
What is not a source. Not a proverb, not a classical phrase, not Chinese. The 狭衣物語 line is the old sense of both words and not the ancestor of the sentence [6]; 願いが叶う is the old sentence and not this one [7].
A reading
Of the sentences of hope Japanese has, this is the one a speaker says most and the one whose history is shortest on paper. Its verb is Heian, its noun's sense is Taishō, and the sentence is Shōwa. It needs no source and should not be given a false one; it is simply what the language now says, and it says it well: 叶う is the verb of a wish granted, and 夢 has meant what I hope for for a century. A reader who wants the older Japanese has 願いが叶う, a wish come true; one who wants what the language says now has this sentence exactly.
Notes
- が marks the subject: 夢 is what comes true.
References
- 「適う」, 大辞泉・精選版日本国語大辞典, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/適う
- 「夢」, 精選版日本国語大辞典, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/夢
- 「叶」, 普及版字通, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/叶
- Google Books Ngram Viewer, search on "dreams come true", "Dreams Come True" and "make your dreams come true". https://books.google.com/ngrams/
- "DREAMS COME TRUE", Japanese Wikipedia. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/DREAMS_COME_TRUE
- 狭衣物語, 四之上, scan 20 (1600 print). https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2544518/1/20
- 東籬園瀬川路考, 時雨の袖, 1825, scan 12. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/8943099/1/12
- トルストイ, 戦争と平和 (訳 島村抱月), 1916, scan 205. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/954325/1/205
- 馬場孤蝶 (訳), ホオマア イリアード, 1915, scan 301. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/950223/1/301