I am working on an essay for school and I was looking at a wood-block print called, " 我艦隊於黄海清艦撃沈之圖 " by Kobayashi Kiyochika.
According to websites, in romaji this is, "Waga kantai Kôkai ni oite Shikan o uchi shizumeru no zu"
However when I was looking at each kanji it turned out more like: "Waga kantai oite kōkai shinkan gekichin no zu" ”わが かんたい おいて こうかい しんかん げきちん の ず”
Is the website wrong or am I?
And If I am wrong, could you explain what I did that was wrong.
If you look at the real scale image of 我艦隊於黄海清艦撃沈之圖, you can see a few small okurigana attached to kanji.
Although it does not conform today's standard orthography, it makes the name unambiguously read as 我【わ】が艦隊【かんたい】黄海【こうかい】に於【おい】て清艦【しんかん】を撃【う】ち沈【しず】(め/む)る之【の】圖【ず】, which basically agrees with that romaji (except it's shinkan, which seems to be a typo).
於 is a Chinese preposition "to/at", and through the kanbun kundoku tradition, it is normally translated as ～において with reversed order. When Chinese was regarded as the prestigious writing language, such orthographical convention was usually employed even when writing Japanese.
But only a handful of kanji are commonly written reversed as shorthands today, such as:
A convenient example on Google:
我艦隊於黄海清艦撃沈之圖 seems to be in kanbun-style, i.e., it's written following the Chinese grammar. The grammar of kanbun is closer to that of English because Chinese is an SVO (subject-verb-object) language. You cannot read it as a meaningful Japanese sentence without changing the reading order.
"In Yellow Sea" is 於黄海 in kanbun (於 = "in/at"), but it has to be 黄海に於いて when "read as a meaningful Japanese (kundoku)". 於いて黄海 is simply ungrammatical as a Japanese phrase. Please read the example in the Wikipedia article to catch what is happening here.
