What Are We Reading When We “Read the Room”?
Even When Grammar Closes, Context Remains Open: Language, Relational Fields, and Forms of Inori Through Geometric Differences Between Japanese and English
This essay reworks the inquiry developed in the video as a written piece. Its figures are stills selected from the completed video.
When we say that someone can “read the room,” what are they reading?
The expressions and tones of the people around them? An intention left unspoken? Or something wider: the relations among the people present, the objects arranged around them, habits carried in the body, and the different histories through which each of these has come to be there?
I begin this inquiry with two concrete examples.
The first is an English sentence:
Can you keep a secret?
The second is a hesitant opening that may be heard at a Japanese dining table:
あ……あの……
Ah… ano… — roughly, “Um…”
In the first example, each successive word seems to place another part of a relation within the sentence: a listener, an action, and an object. In the second, the request is never fully stated, yet the person sitting beside the speaker may still pass the soy sauce.
I do not want to move too quickly from these examples to a conclusion about what English or Japanese essentially is. I will first follow what appears to be happening within each example. Only then will I ask why two different geometries might arise.
The geometries in this essay are not mathematically proven structures. They are models I have constructed in order to think about relations, using sources, observations, and thought experiments as guides. I will try to keep apart three things: what historical or empirical sources support, what can be observed within the examples, and the interpretations I bring to them. The models remain open to other readings, including my own later reconsideration.
Figure 1: Two points of departure: “Can you keep a secret?” and “Ah… ano…”
Building a Relation, One Word at a Time
Before anything has been said, there are many possibilities for what may follow. I draw this range as the broad base of a triangle.
With Can, a pattern begins to take shape: an utterance asking about possibility or ability. With Can you, the word you explicitly places the listener within the sentence. Can you keep adds an action — keeping, or safeguarding — and a direction of action begins to appear between the listener and something not yet specified. The article a signals that a noun naming the object of that action will follow. Finally, secret is added.
In this model, each word narrows the range of what can come next. The relation among listener, action, and object comes together as a single question.
Yet the word secret does not disclose what the secret contains. Whose secret is it? From whom is it to be kept? What happens if it cannot be kept? Words may assign positions within a relation without carrying the whole history of that relation into the sentence.
For this model, I consider the written word secret separately from the question mark that follows it:
Can you keep a secret
>
and then: ?
The mark that signals the ending is placed as one further step. A question mark has a dot beneath it. An exclamation mark does too, while a period is the dot itself. I therefore draw the triangle narrowing as the words are added and finally converging on a point. The boundary of the written sentence and the vertex of the geometry coincide.
This is a visual model based on how a written sentence closes. In spoken conversation, no one pronounces the question mark itself. The rise and fall of a voice, breathing, pauses, silence, gaze, and the movement of yielding a speaking turn to another person create a provisional ending.
Figure 2: The narrowing triangle: Can → Can you → Can you keep → a secret → ?
The Sentence Closes; the Relational Field Remains
The triangle represents a process in which possible continuations narrow overall as words are added and one relation receives a grammatical boundary. It does not claim that an actual listener’s understanding simply narrows in one direction.
A listener may anticipate what comes next, hesitate between possibilities, and revise an earlier understanding when a later word arrives. What closes at the point of the triangle is the sentence assembled here. Its context does not close with it.
The same question — “Can you keep a secret?” — may resonate differently depending on tone, facial expression, the relation between the two people, their earlier conversation, and memories they share. It may open an intimate confidence. It may test the other person. In some circumstances, it may even sound like pressure or a threat.
The secret in this sentence cannot be fully understood as an abstract object found only in a dictionary. What the word refers to between these two people may vary with earlier events, trust, hesitation, and relations of power. Those histories overlap behind the word, but they are not exhaustively written into it.
I therefore do not consider the English sentence to exist apart from a relational field. What the model brings to the foreground is one particular operation: some relations within the field are separated out as listener, action, and object, then explicitly reassembled through the order of words. Grammar gives an outline to one relation. Yet the bodies, memories, trust, voices, and silences that support that outline do not all fit within the sentence alone.
Even when grammar closes, context remains open. The title of this essay points to that field which remains.
A Relational Field Responds to “Ah… ano…”
Now imagine a table in a restaurant serving Japanese set meals. I have ordered sashimi. There is no soy sauce in front of me, but there is a bottle in front of the person beside me.
I could say, “Could you pass me the soy sauce in front of you?” In that sentence, the person addressed, the object, its position, and the requested action are all specified in words. But I might instead look toward the soy sauce and say only, “Ah… ano…” The person beside me may pass it over.
I do not locate the meaning of this scene in those brief sounds alone.
There is an embodied eating practice of using soy sauce with sashimi, a practice people have come to share in part. There is the present arrangement: none in front of one person, some in front of the other. There is a distance across which the other person can reach and pass it. There are conventions for handling things on a table and the physical and social relation between the two people. Gaze, pauses, expression, and tone of voice also play a part.
While the speaker is searching for words, the listener may already be considering what is being asked. Their hand may begin to move toward the soy sauce before a sentence is complete. That movement then becomes a signal back to the speaker. If the listener reaches for the wrong thing, the speaker can clarify: “Ah, the soy sauce.” Meaning is not completed by the initial sounds alone. It may be reworked through the other person’s movement and the words that follow.
Figure 3: The dining-table field: speaker, listener, soy sauce, sashimi, gaze, and the movement of a hand
Soy Sauce and Sashimi Carry Histories Too
This relational field is more than a scene in which two people interpret one another’s cues. The soy sauce itself is there. The sashimi itself is there. So are the dishes, chopsticks, and table.
Soy sauce carries cultural and social histories. It has continued to be made as a seasoning, associated with particular dishes, placed on dining tables, and passed from person to person. It also carries a material history of production and distribution. Its ingredients grew, were prepared and fermented, and the resulting liquid was put into a container and transported. The soy sauce before us has material properties in the present: it is a liquid; it can be poured; it has taste and aroma; and it can be passed by hand in its container.
Sashimi also carries cultural and social histories: techniques for slicing raw fish, knowledge about freshness, the classification of sashimi as a dish, and a history of serving and eating it with soy sauce in homes and restaurants. Overlapping with these are histories of life and matter. A fish lived, passed into human hands, was transported, prepared, sliced, and arranged in its present form.
Dishes and chopsticks carry histories of being made, used, and handled at a table. The bodies of the two people carry histories of learning and repetition, some explicit and some tacit. What is soy sauce used with? How are objects passed at a table? What is a gaze, a pause, or a hesitant voice taken to be doing in relation to another person? These, too, are histories of learning.
In the present scene, where “Ah… ano…” comes to mean “Please pass me the soy sauce,” the eating practices that have connected sashimi with soy sauce may come more strongly to the foreground than the histories of ingredients, fermentation, and transport. Social conventions of passing an object to the person who needs it, and embodied learning through which gaze or hesitation is received as a request, may also play a large part in narrowing the possible meanings.
This does not make material history or material properties disappear. The soy sauce is held in a container, is within reach, and can be lifted and passed. These conditions make the act possible. But they do not, by themselves, fully explain why a brief hesitant sound is received as a request for soy sauce.
People, fish, soy sauce, dishes, voices, gazes, and eating practices do not have identical roles, capacities, or intentions. They do not carry equal weight in shaping meaning at this moment. Even so, they can each be considered a constituent of the relational field in which meaning arises. Different things remain different, retain different strengths and directions, and bring one another to the foreground within their present relations. I use the word resonance for this interplay among unlike things.
I do not locate “Please pass me the soy sauce” solely in the voice, solely in the soy sauce, or solely inside the listener’s mind. Might that meaning arise provisionally as multiple beings and things, together with parts of different kinds of history, come into contact within the arrangement of this moment? The model treats meaning as arising within that resonance.
The relational field here is more than physical space. It is the whole set of conditions through which meaning may arise: situation, bodies, things, relationships, culture, memories, institutions, habits, and the histories accumulated within each of them. It includes not only the immediately visible context but also how its constituents were formed materially, culturally, and socially, and how they came to be here.
Nor is the relational field a finished background. Once the soy sauce is passed, the arrangement changes. The relation between the two people and the words that follow may change with it. The field inherits multiple histories, yet it is continually updated through responses.
Figure 4: Material, cultural, social, and embodied histories flowing into the soy sauce and sashimi
Why Might Two Geometries Arise?
I first considered these two examples. Only afterward did I begin to ask why such a difference might arise.
For the English example, I considered a model in which speaker and listener are set relatively apart from their surroundings, and the speaker becomes the starting point of the utterance. Might this be why the listener, action, and object are placed one by one into a sequence of words?
Separation here does not mean that English speakers actually exist outside their environment. It is not a claim about the condition of human existence. It is a model of how relations are arranged within the utterance in this example.
For the Japanese dining-table example, I considered another model. The speaker, listener, soy sauce, and sashimi are already within the relational field. Perhaps the utterance does less to create a previously nonexistent relation than to activate some of the relations and histories already overlapping there, bringing them forward in a form to which the other person can respond.
The comparison is not made under matching conditions. A complete English question is being set beside a Japanese request that leaves much unsaid. In English, someone looking at the soy sauce may be understood with just, “Could you…?” Japanese can also specify the relation through a full sequence of words.
Two examples cannot establish the essential nature of two languages. Both English and Japanese involve bodies, things, cultures, societies, and carried histories. The question is not whether those conditions are present or absent. It is how much of a relation is specified within an utterance, and which parts are left to relations already present in the field and to histories that are only partly shared.
Which relations are drawn out of the field and arranged in a line? Which beings, things, and histories are left within the field to resonate there? To me, something that may be called a geometry of language appears in this difference in the center of gravity.
I have previously called the two tendencies “linear language” and “language of the field.” Here I restate them more carefully. The first linearizes relations within a sequence of words. In the second, meaning arises as different beings, things, and carried histories resonate with one another. They are not sealed into separate languages. Both may appear, in different proportions, within the same conversation.
Figure 5: A model that relatively separates and linearizes relations / a model that activates relations from within a field
A Voice Moves Through the Relational Field in Time
Natural conversation has another important constraint: a voice does not arrive all at once. It unfolds through time.
Speech has an order. A listener cannot receive the entire sentence from its beginning in a single instant, and the order of sounds already spoken cannot be rearranged on the spot. I provisionally call this property the arrow of time to which an utterance is subject.
Yet listeners do not necessarily remain inactive until the sentence ends. They may form a provisional understanding of what has been heard, anticipate possible continuations, read expression, gaze, body, and the arrangement of objects, and begin preparing a response. The speaker, meanwhile, chooses words while hearing their own voice and taking in the other person’s reactions, adjusting what comes next.
A study of yes-or-no questions drawn from naturally occurring conversation in ten languages found an overall average of about 0.21 seconds between the end of a question and the beginning of a spoken or gestural response. This value does not directly measure when comprehension or preparation for speech began. Nor can it be compared directly with numerical results from studies conducted under different conditions. Still, the short transition offers one basis for considering the possibility that, in some conversations, comprehension and response preparation already overlap before the question ends.
The audible voice may proceed in a single sequence while the processes involved in understanding and responding do not. Selecting words. Anticipating what may come next. Reading the position of an object or the movement of a hand. Gauging physical distance and one’s relation with another person. Drawing on memory and on cultural, social, and material histories. Several processes may partly overlap, each across a different span of time.
In writing, a person may revise before sending, pause while reading, or return to an earlier passage. Face-to-face conversation and calls offer less room of that kind. Once spoken, a sound cannot be made unspoken. Yet a correction, a question in return, silence, or an action by the other person may allow earlier words to be read differently. The arrow of time points in one direction, but relations and meanings within the field may still be reconfigured afterward.
Figure 6: Sequential speech alongside partly parallel comprehension, anticipation, and response preparation
Both Lines and Fields Can Open or Close a Relation
Linearity cannot simply be equated with closure, nor the relational field with openness.
Words that make one direction explicit can communicate a warning, responsibility, consent, or refusal without ambiguity. “Please stop.” “I do not consent.” When time is limited, a closed sentence can protect a person. Yet if only one direction is allowed to count as correct, linearity may also fix a single hierarchy or interpretation in place.
A relational field can include bodily responses that remain unspoken, the resistance that materials offer, pain continuing from the past, and different carried histories. Yet it may also prescribe an invisible correct answer: “Read the room.” Without it being clear who decided, the field may exclude people who carry different histories and obscure where responsibility lies.
The existence of several meanings, or a feeling of resonance, is not enough to establish that a relation is open. Does the other person retain a way to question, refuse, take distance, or leave? Can a necessary boundary be stated and still remain open to later questioning? Can people intervene in a relation that has arisen, stop it, reconfigure it, or exit it? I use these questions as criteria for examining the models themselves.
pray ≒ inori: A Bridge into the Second Half
Another example makes the difference between a single line and a relational field easier to see.
In religious usage, the English verb pray is often paired in translation with the Japanese words 祈る, inoru, and 祈り, inori. I place a sign of approximate equality — ≒ — between them rather than an equals sign. They overlap, but the forms of relation that arise through them need not be identical.
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The English word pray can be traced through Middle English and Anglo-French to the Latin precari, whose meanings include “to ask” and “to beg.” That is as far as the word’s history directly takes us. From there, I select one asymmetric relation that may appear within petition and draw it as a line between the one who prays below and a site of address above. This form is neither prescribed by the word’s history nor intended as a model of every act of prayer in English. It is one aspect brought forward for comparison.
Beside it, I place one relational model for what I sense in the Japanese word inori. From this point onward, I write INORI in capital letters when referring to this particular concept of mine. It is not a definition of Japanese inori in general.
In this model, people, nature, places, and things are not treated as beings with identical capacities or intentions. Their differences remain. The one engaged in INORI is also placed as one node within the relational field. Relations do not radiate from one being at the center; they open in several directions among different nodes. I depict this as a geometry of participation in relations.
The English words pray and prayer can serve as mediating words through which an English reader approaches this concept. I do not, however, treat prayer and INORI as equivalents. A single act of praying may contain both petitionary movement and participation in relations. The diagram does not depict progress from left to right or sort prayer into good and bad forms. It is a comparative model that makes differences available for thought when translation might otherwise make them less visible.
The linguistic inquiry in the first half can stand on its own. From here, I change the theme and follow written characters, history, and the relational field into my own reflections on INORI.
Figure 7: pray ≒ inori: a single petitionary line and a multidirectional field of participation
信仰 and 信向: What the Sources Support
For a long time, I have felt some unease about the Japanese word 信仰, shinkō, a common term for religious faith. It combines 信, associated with believing or trusting, and 仰, associated with looking upward. Before connecting that unease directly to an interpretation of the characters, I first examined how other written forms had actually been used.
信向, which combines 信 with 向, “to turn toward,” is not a spelling I invented.
The two characters 信向 appear in the text of 観経疏伝通記, Kangyōsho Denzūki, by the Kamakura-period monk Ryōchū, as transmitted in later printed editions. They also appear in 特命全権大使米欧回覧実記, Tokumei Zenken Taishi Beiō Kairan Jikki, published in 1878. Its use therefore did not end in the Kamakura period.
In journal samples from the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, 信向 accounts for 4.6 percent of the combined occurrences of 信仰 and 信向 in 1895, and 2.9 percent in 1901. No occurrences of 信向 appear in the sampled years from 1909 onward. These are figures for selected journal materials, not a count of every publication in Japan. Considered together with other sources, they support an estimate that ordinary usage converged almost entirely on 信仰 from the late 1890s into the early 1900s.
信向 did not disappear at that point. Scattered examples in ordinary prose can be confirmed in publications as late as 1943. The 1938 print edition of 大言海, Daigenkai, lists 信向, 信迎, and 信仰 together in a single entry. An educational reference work published in 1934 describes 信向 as a compound found in classical Chinese writing and uses 信仰 as the ordinary religious term by which to explain it. In that source, 信向 is treated as a form requiring explanation when older texts are read.
Within the materials examined, I found no single regulation prohibiting 信向 and no one year in which it was removed from use. A process can be considered in which one spelling was selected repeatedly in publishing, dictionaries, and education until it became the ordinary form for the next generation. The evidence does not establish whose judgment lay behind each individual choice or why those choices accumulated as they did.
The dictionary 雑字類書, Zatsuji Ruisho, identified by the National Diet Library as a manuscript copied in the middle of the Muromachi period, gives the historical-kana reading シンガウ, shin-gau, beside 信仰. In modern kana this would be しんごう, shingō. This is not a complete reconstruction of actual pronunciation at the time, nor does it prove that the same reading was used for 信向.
Up to this point, I have remained within what the sources can support. What follows is not a claim about what people in the past intended by these characters. It is my present reading of characters that have reached me from the past.
Figure 8: Source timeline for 信向: transmitted Kamakura-period text, 1878, 1895, 1901, 1934, 1938, and 1943
The Agency of Turning Toward, and Shingō
At times, the character 仰 seems to me to carry the image of raising one’s gaze toward something already positioned above.
By contrast, I feel movement and directedness in 向, the character for turning toward. I also feel it can be read without predetermining the spatial position of what one turns toward.
What do I turn toward? From what distance, and in what posture, do I face it? Do I offer words, respond through action, or remain silent? I layer onto 向 the activity and agency of the one who offers INORI: a person does not merely occupy a prescribed position, but turns, participates in a relation, and adjusts their orientation.
What one turns toward is not limited to what is above. Toward another person. Toward nature. Toward the past. Toward a future not yet seen. Toward the body or one’s inner life. From within a relational field that includes oneself, directedness may open in many directions.
Opening in many directions does not mean turning indiscriminately toward everything. A person may question an inherited orientation and turn again when needed. Pause. Leave a relation. Choose what to turn toward, how to orient oneself, and what to offer — and take responsibility for that choice.
At the same time, this agency does not confer the power to determine what will arise at the site one turns toward. When the actual other is a person, the one who offers INORI cannot determine how that person receives or responds. I try reading 向 as an agency distinct from domination: one that preserves both the ability to choose one’s own orientation and the inability to govern what lies beyond it.
I then overlay the old recorded reading シンガウ with characters closer to my own sense of INORI: 心, “heart,” and 郷, “home place” or “homeland.” I call this 心郷, Shingō: the heart’s homeland.
This is not an etymological claim that a word changed historically in the sequence 信仰 → 信向 → 心郷. It is the order of thought I follow now. 信仰, Shinkō: to believe and look upward. 信向, also Shinkō: to believe and turn toward. 心郷, Shingō: the heart’s homeland. I receive characters carried from the past, question and choose an orientation anew, accept responsibility for that choice, and offer it toward the future.
Figure 9: 信仰 — 信向 — 心郷, presented as the author’s present sequence of thought rather than an etymology
Different Kinds of History Flowing into Shingō
I do not locate the heart’s homeland solely inside an individual. I also turn toward the different kinds of long history that flow into the beings and things present now.
The cosmic history through which matter has traveled. The evolutionary lineages through which living beings have branched. The continuities of heredity and development. Cultures transformed through learning and transmission. These are not established by the same kinds of evidence, and their mechanisms of change differ. Yet they overlap, to me, in one respect: each allows the present to be understood in relation to the past.
Here I use ancestor as a metaphor broader than its biological sense. From humans, toward life. From life, toward the matter that makes life possible. Further, toward the early universe. This is not an attempt to collapse scientific histories into one lineage. It is a way of widening the idea of a homeland beyond humanity alone.
Humans, other animals, plants, mountains, water, stones, air: each present form can be approached as an emergence from a long history of formation and from different processes. I am not trying to gather everything into the claim, “We are connected because we are the same.” I am asking whether relations may still be traced while different forms and divergent histories remain.
The fact that a physical history can be traced does not mean that science alone determines what that history means to us. The history science can describe must remain distinct from the meaning I feel within it and from my act of receiving it as a homeland of the heart.
Nor are the histories flowing into Shingō limited to the paths matter has taken. There are concepts and signs that have been inherited and reread; lineages of meaning layered onto words and events; and continuities of feeling passed from person to person, changing along the way. I include these continuities of concepts, meanings, and feelings within Shingō as histories that cannot be grasped through material form alone.
Shingō is not a word for reducing concepts, meanings, and feelings to material history. It is a name I offer in order to consider how the heart in the present may relate to different kinds of history without erasing their differences.
Figure 10: Histories of matter, life, culture, concepts, signs, meanings, and feelings flowing into Shingō
Rereading a Relation to the Past Without Changing What Happened
Tracing history has another direction: from the present toward the past.
We cannot change an event that actually occurred. Later reinterpretation cannot erase the pain experienced at the time, the facts of who did what, or the responsibilities involved.
Yet what a past event means to the self in the present may change. Its meaning, its interpretation, and the way it is evaluated can sometimes be reread and reconfigured through later experience and dialogue.
A person may continue to regard a painful event simply as painful. There is no need to force that to change. Its meaning may remain undecided. At another time, another meaning may appear alongside it: “Because that event happened, I am who I am now.”
This does not glorify suffering or make the event right. Another meaning may be added while “I hated it,” “I was hurt,” and “It was wrong” all remain. A relation to the past may be reconfigured without erasing the meanings that came before.
Even when the facts do not change, the place an event occupies within the present self, and the present evaluation of the past, may change. Tracing a history with care may become a path toward caring for the self who lived through that history and is here now.
To me, this kind of rereading can feel like one form of healing, or of release without erasure, that the present self may be able to offer toward the past.
But this rereading cannot be demanded of anyone. A person may be unable to change a meaning now, may not want to change it, or may wish to leave it without judgment. Those choices remain with that person.
Figure 11: The event remains unchanged while its meaning or place in the present may be reread
A Minimal Relational Structure for Thinking About INORI
With the previous inquiry in view, I provisionally set out three conditions for considering INORI. They do not form a definition meant to encompass every way people pray. They are part of my own conceptual rereading.
First, there is a site of address. It may be someone present, a later self, or a future receiver. It may also be a place or being from which the one making the offering awaits a response.
Second, the offered words or forms carry a directedness: a wish for what is offered to reach that site as something.
Third, the one making the offering cannot fully govern how it reaches the site or what follows.
When the actual receiver is a person, that person has a body, a carried history, and a time of their own. Immediate understanding is not guaranteed. The offering may be refused, held in suspension, or reread after a long time.
The one making the offering may place nature, a place, or the dead at a site from which a response is awaited. Yet this does not prove that such a site understands meaning or responds in the same way as a person here and now. The shared point is only that the one who offers cannot determine alone what follows. The reasons involved, and the forms of relation, need not be the same.
This structure does not automatically make an expression good. At least in this account, I do not call violence, sanctions, or compelled obedience INORI. What I look for is not the attempt to govern another, but the opening that remains because the one making the offering still cannot fully govern how it is received.
Figure 12: Site of address / directedness toward reaching it / an opening that cannot be fully governed
The Ethic of INORI I Would Choose
On this minimal structure, I place three orientations for the INORI I would choose.
The first is to offer Respect without erasing the different histories involved.
The second is to recognize that I, too, am within the Relation.
The third is to leave room for what Resonates back to change my understanding and my next action over time, without demanding immediate agreement.
The Mediator considered here is neither a fourth value nor a fixed status. It is a temporary role that a person, word, image, object, or event may take on within a particular relation, carrying that relation into another place and time.
A mediator does not stand outside the relational field to judge two sides. A person who takes on the role is changed by what they receive. Words, images, objects, and events may also change in meaning or position within the relation. Relations found among unlike things can then be carried onward: between people and nature, place and memory, what can be seen and what people feel or speak of as unseen.
However open a field may appear, if a person involved has no path to refuse or leave it, the field may become a new enclosure. When nature, places, or other nonhuman presences are placed at a site from which a response is awaited, I must also continue to ask whether I am fixing them within the meaning I expect.
I do not reserve the agency I have layered onto 向 in 信向 for the one who offers INORI alone. When the actual other is a person, I want the relation to preserve that person’s agency as well. To respond. To hold a response in suspension. To refuse. To turn again. To leave. These possibilities remain with the other person.
Is there respect? Is the other being forced into the relation? Are they being pressed to answer? Is there time for silence, suspension, refusal, and exit? At least for expressions I personally offer as INORI, I want to keep testing and revising them through these questions.
Figure 13: Respect, Relation, and Resonance, with the Mediator carrying a relation onward
After Grammar Closes
This essay, too, arranges words in a line and offers them within a span of time. It has been composed so that later words may narrow earlier meanings and sometimes make them available for rereading.
I call the place to which my INORI returns Shingō. Whether to receive that name, choose another word, or leave it undecided remains with the reader. Someone may leave that place unnamed or choose not to turn toward it at all.
Agreement, dissent, rereading, silence, and leaving partway through all remain with the reader. I cannot determine alone how this essay will arrive or what kind of time it will live within the person who receives it.
Here, this sentence ends with a period. The essay reaches a provisional stopping point. But this ending is not the end of the receiver’s time.
What will the reader think next? How will they respond — or not respond?
Grammar may close, yet its context remains open. For the reader, and for me as well.
— -
Selected Sources
- Stivers et al. (2009), “Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation,” PNAS
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2705608/
- Levinson & Torreira (2015), “Timing in turn-taking and its implications for processing models of language,” Frontiers in Psychology
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4464110/
- Ryōchū, 観経疏伝通記 (Kangyōsho Denzūki), transmitted text containing 信向
https://jodoshuzensho.jp/jozensearch_post/search/detail.php?lineno=J02_0320
- Kume Kunitake, ed., 特命全権大使米欧回覧実記 (Tokumei Zenken Taishi Beiō Kairan Jikki), 1878
https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/761504/1/167
- 雑字類書 (Zatsuji Ruisho, Bunmei-bon Setsuyōshū), 信仰 / シンガウ
https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1286982/1/514
- National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, Corpus of Historical Japanese: Integrated Vocabulary List
https://repository.ninjal.ac.jp/records/2000263
- Ōtsuki Fumihiko, 言海 (Genkai), 信向 / 信迎
https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/992954/1/310
- Ueda Kazutoshi and Matsui Kanji, 大日本国語辞典 (Dai Nihon Kokugo Jiten), vol. 2, 1916
https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/954646/1/595
- Ōtsuki Fumihiko, 大言海 (Daigenkai), vol. 2, 1938 print edition
https://archive.org/download/daigenkai02tsuk/page/n718.jpg
- Tsukamoto Tetsuzō, ed., 標準国文問題新選教授参考書 (Hyōjun Kokubun Mondai Shinsen Kyōju Sankōsho), 1934
https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1465853/1/58
- Koyama Yūgen, ed., 伊豆の伝説 (Izu no Densetsu), 1943
https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1062599/1/58
- Merriam-Webster, “pray”
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pray
- Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, “pray”
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/pray_1
The frequencies for 信向 concern selected journal samples in the corpus. The research conducted for this work found no blanket rule prohibiting the spelling and no direct order by a particular editor to remove it. 信仰 → 信向 → 心郷 is the author’s present sequence of thought, not a proposed etymological history.
