不被下候: When was it common, and what were the rules?

Question

In a shrine graffito written in 1559, two carpenters complain:

其時座主ハ大キナコスデオチヤリテ一度モ焼酎ヲ不被下候
'At that time, the high priest (stingy bugger!) gave us not even a drop of shochu to drink.'

The form of the main verb 不被下候 includes 不 (negation) and 被 (passivisation), followed by the verb with そうろう. Thus, くだされずそうろう "(we) were not given". The order of the morphemes as is pronounced is inverted from the order as is written.

Meanwhile, a shochu manufacturer has a product 不被下候 in reference to this legendary act. They give the reading くださらずそうろう.

• When was it common to write in this manner?
• In what other ways was Japanese verbal morphology mapped onto kanji in this way?
• Which of the readings くださらずそうろう and くだされずそうろう is correct?

Answer 1

As sawa and Gradius say, this is part of the kundoku tradition, but I feel that this particular example is more usefully identified as sōrō bun, which is a Medieval-through-Modern phenomenon and has a couple of distinguishing characteristics, most notably:

• Use of sōrō 候 at the end of sentences (hence the name of the style)

• Use of Japanese rather than Chinese word order, with the exception of certain multi-character groups like 不被下候 (verbs were particularly prone to this because Japanese verb morphology is synthetic; to express "(verb) + passive/honorific + not + polite" you need four different Chinese characters. So this sort of multi-character group was written in Chinese order due to the influence of kanbun, but it was read as a purely Japanese verb (that is, its meaning was interpreted as a gestalt, and a Japanese "reading" was assigned).

Re your last question, I would certainly expect /kudasarezu/ rather than /kudasarazu/ for 不被下, but I'm not confident enough in my understanding of the ins and outs of sōrō bun to declare the latter "incorrect".

Answer 2

It is a tradition since 漢文訓読. Cf. http://www.ic.daito.ac.jp/~oukodou/kuzukago/kundoku.html#9. You can simply regard that the 返り点 is omitted.