a spoken language on the mainland (if indeed it had ever been), has been in use in the Japanese archipelago longer than the Japanese language itself. The oldest written remnants found in Japan are all in Chinese, though it is a matter of considerable debate whether traces of the Japanese vernacular are to be found in them. Taking both languages together until the end of the nineteenth century, and taking into account all the monastic documents, literature in the widest sense of the term, and texts in "near-Chinese" (hentai-kanbun), it is entirely possible that the sheer volume of texts written in Chinese in Japan slightly exceed what was written in Japanese. Inasmuch as Classical Chinese was originally unpunctuated, the kanbun tradition developed various conventional reading punctuation, diacritical, and syntactic markers. "guiding marks for rendering Chinese into Japanese" "the Japanese reading/pronunciation of a kanji character" "a Japanese reading of a Chinese passage" "diacritical dots on characters to indicate Japanese grammatical inflections" "punctuation marks (e.g., 、comma and 。 period)" "marks placed alongside characters indicating their Japanese ordering is to be 'returned' (read in reverse)" Kaeriten grammatically transform Classical Chinese into Japanese word order. Two are syntactic symbols, the | "linking mark" denotes phrases composed of more than one characters, and the denotes "return/reverse marks". The rest are kanji commonly used in numbering and ordering systems: 4 numerals ichi "one", ni "two", san "three", and yon "four"; 3 locatives ue "top", naka 中 "middle", and shita "bottom"; 4 Heavenly Stems kinoe "first", kinoto "second", hinoe "third", and hinoto "fourth"; and the 3 cosmological ten "heaven", chi "earth", and jin "person". For written English, these kaeriten would correspond with 1, 2, 3; I, II, III; A, B, C, etc. As an analogy for kanbun "mentally changing the word order" from Chinese sentences with subject–verb–object (SVO) into Japanese subject–object–verb (SOV), John DeFrancis gives this example of using an English (another SVO language) literal translation to render the Latin (another SOV) Commentarii de Bello Gallico opening. DeFrancis adds, "A better analogy would be the reverse situation–Caesar rendering an English text in his native language and adding Latin case endings." Two English textbooks for students of kanbun are An Introduction to Kambun by Sydney Crawcour, reviewed by Marian Ury in 1990, and An Introduction to Japanese Kanbun by Komai and Rohlich, reviewed by Andrew Markus in 1990 and Wixted in 1998. Example The illustration to the right