Japanese language

“ But in the language of the learned classes and officials, words derived from the Chinese abound; and from a false affectation of learning the preference is generally given to such words, even when, in their own more beautiful native tongue, synonymous words exist. The native Japanese language seems to be spoken with greater purity by the women than by any other class.
Kan-on. If the Japanese had confined themselves to one system of phonetics for the Chinese characters, the study of the language would have been much simplified, at least to the foreigner. ”

“ If one wall is dark, the other catches the sun. Practically all Japanese students now study English in their schools, our language being considered next in importance to their own. And though, as I have said, many of them have perfectly mastered English despite the enormous difficulties it presents to them, there are many others whose English is imperfect, and whose "Japanned English," as some one has called it, achieves effects the unconscious grotesqueness of which startles and fascinates Americans and Englishmen. ”

“ If there is one people on the face of the globe who rejoice in an impossible language, it is the Japanese. In the early days of foreign intercourse a good Jesuit father reported that the Japanese were courteous and polite to strangers, but their language was plainly the invention of the devil. To a modern mind the language may have outlived its putative father, but its reputation has not improved, so far as ease is concerned. Yet who will say that it has impaired national efficiency? ”

“ Frequently in this style marks or signs are used along the line of the characters to designate the order in which they should be read in translating the sentences into the Japanese language, or to suit the native idiom. Another, and the most common, is that in which the Chinese characters are used to a greater or less extent, mixed with native words written with their own letters, and where the structure and idiom are purely Japanese. Most of the literature intended for the unlearned and common reader is in this form. ”

“ Worst of all he must learn English,—a language of which the difficulty to the Japanese cannot be even faintly imagined by any one unfamiliar with the construction of the native tongue,—a language so different from his own that the very simplest Japanese phrase cannot be intelligibly rendered into English by a literal translation of the words or even the form of the thought. ”

“ Upper-class people, whom one meets socially, always speak English, French, or German. Scholars declare that the mastery of the language takes from twelve to thirty years, and the compiler of the standard lexicon modestly says for himself that forty years is not enough. With a few most illustrious exceptions, no foreigner, who has not learned Japanese almost before his own tongue, has ever been able to grasp its idioms so as to express himself with clearness and accuracy. ”

“ My father was to pay a school-tax and I to attend a new school, where instruction was not in penmanship alone but extended over various subjects. Text-books on arithmetic, Japanese geography and history had been compiled after the American pattern, but no grammar appeared; the educational department left the language to be taught by the purely inductive method. The fact is that the Japanese language has not been systematized; should one attempt it he would find it a tremendous task. ”

“ Hundreds of such words have been manufactured in Japan during the past half-century to equip men for the study of Western learning, and the same process, though on a very much smaller scale, had been going on continuously for many centuries, so that the Japanese language has come to embody a very large number of Chinese words, though they are not pronounced as the Chinese pronounce the corresponding ideographs. ”

“ It was inevitable that the Japanese language, which had now reached its highest degree of perfection as an instrument for the expression of thought, should, sooner or later, be applied to some more serious purpose than the writing of poetry, stories, diaries, and other light literature. The Yeigwa Monogatari is notable as the first instance of its being used for history. ”

“ The first was to protest against an idea entertained by some of my countrymen that the Japanese language is very imperfect, and therefore it must be exterminated. This idea, however, appears to have been given up as altogether preposterous and extravagant. The second was to give the general idea of the Japanese language as it is spoken. ”

“ The Japanese language has, as we have seen, many words referring to the individuality, to the self of manhood; it merely lacks the general abstract term, "personality." This is, however, in keeping with the general characteristics of the language. Abstract terms are, compared with English, relatively rare. Yet with the new civilization they are being coined and introduced. Furthermore, the English term "personality" is readily used by the great majority of educated Christians just as they use such words as "life," "power," "success," "patriotism," and "Christianity." ”

“ It will be well for the intellectual progress of Japan if under this new impulse, which forces the native mind onward in the path of educational improvement, it should become conscious of a power to renovate the native language. This would be worth more to the people than hundreds of steamers and thousands of miles of railways. The English language is much more fitted than the Chinese, to improve the Japanese language. There is more freedom in its syntax, and by its polysyllabic structure it is more akin to the Japanese and perhaps better able to lend to it elements of lasting utility. ”

“ Though not originally related to Chinese, Japanese has adopted an enormous number of Chinese words, such words having naturally followed Chinese civilisation into the archipelago. Even at the present day, the Japanese language has recourse to Chinese for terms to indicate all such new things and ideas as "telegram," "bicycle," "photograph," "democracy," "natural selection," "limited liability," etc., etc., much as we ourselves have recourse to Latin and Greek. ”

“ The Japanese written language, the language of Japanese literature, tends to assimilate itself to Chinese, and fresh Chinese words and expressions are continually taking root in Japan. The Japanese are a people quite abnormal and incalculable, with a touch of romance, a conception of honour, a quality of imagination, and a clearness of intelligence that renders possible for them things inconceivable of any other existing nation. ”

“ In the Japanese poetical language all the vowels are of the same length, so that quantity, such as we find in the poetry of Greece and Rome, is unknown. Nor is there any regular succession of accented and unaccented syllables as in the poetry of modern Europe, the Japanese laying hardly any greater stress on one part of a word than on another. In short, the only thing in the mechanism of Japanese poetry which distinguishes it from prose is the alternation of phrases of five and seven syllables each. It is, in fact, a species of blank verse. ”

“ A Japanese is always gratified by the genuine interest of a foreigner in anything connected with his home, and will usually point out the special features of the object of interest in eloquent and poetical phrases, confusing enough to the foreigner, whose command of the Japanese language cannot as a rule rise to such heights. ”

“ In reading a Chinese book, a good Japanese scholar makes a kind of running translation into his own vernacular, sometimes giving the sound, and sometimes giving the sense, and the katakana is used in the latter case, to indicate the tense, or case of the native word. Having the Chinese language as well as its native stores to draw from, the Japanese is both copious and flexible, and by its syllabic construction, also euphonious and mellifluous, in these respects being far superior to the Chinese. ”

“ Philology is now a recognized science; comparative philologists by limiting themselves almost exclusively to one family of languages have left the more to be learned by inquirers in new fields. We have grammars and dictionaries of the Chinese, Mongol and Manchu languages on the one side, and of the languages and dialects spoken on the islands of the Eastern Archipelago and of the Pacific Ocean on the other. By placing them in juxtaposition it is not difficult to assign to the Japanese language its true place in the world of speech. ”

“ More than one scholar in European tongues has declared Japanese to be the most difficult language in the world. One has said that a man "can learn to understand as much of Spanish in six months as he can of Japanese in six years." Chinese ideographs are said to outnumber the Japanese characters to-day, and in numerous instances have actually displaced them, even among the common people. ”

“ We ourselves have repeatedly been the corpus vile of such experiments. A second Japano-English style is exemplified in so-called educational works, such as Conversations in English and Japanese for Merchant who the English Language,—English Letter Writer, for the Gentlemen who regard on the Commercial and an Official,—Englishand. Japanies. Names on Letteps, and other productions whereby shameless scribblers make money out of unsophisticated students. And yet these curiosities of literature are too grotesque for at least the European reader to be long angry with them. ”

“ As early as the tenth century, while the learned affected a pedantic style so interlarded with Chinese as to be unintelligible, the cultivation of the native tongue was left to the ladies of the court, a task which they nobly discharged. It is a remarkable fact, without parallel in the history of letters, that a very large proportion of the best writings of the best ages was the work of women, and their achievement in the domain of letters is one of the anomalies with which Japan has surprised and delighted the world. It was their genius that made the Japanese a literary language. ”

“ The peculiarities of the languages concerned should not be forgotten. Those of the European languages it is impossible to enumerate here, but it may not be out of place to note briefly a few characteristics of the Japanese language which have a bearing on this question.
R is never found at the beginning of a word. ”

“ N is the negative sound in Japanese as well as in European languages. It appears in ina, no, inamu, to refuse naki, not, the na of the neg. imperative etc. The use of n for negatives in European languages is too well known to require illustration.
There is no more essential part of a language than its system of pronouns, and it is therefore important to see if any resemblances can be traced in these parts of speech in Japanese and the Aryan languages. ”

“ What nation, for example, ever voluntarily set itself to learn the ways and thoughts and languages of foreign nations as persistently as Japan? That there has been fluctuation of intensity is not so surprising as that, through a period of thirty years, she has kept steadily at it. Tens of thousands of her young men are now, able to read the English language with some facility; thousands are also able to read German and French. Foreign languages are compulsory in all the advanced schools. ”

“ Because the Japanese have failed in the past to produce literature equal to the best of Western lands, we are not justified in asserting that she never will and that she is inherently deficient in literary imagination. In regard to certain forms of light fancy, all admit that Japanese poems are unsurpassed by those of other lands. Japanese amative poetry is noted for its delicate fancies and plays on words exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, of translation, or even of expression, to one unacquainted with the language. ”

“ Only within recent times has the common language of the people been used for writing books and scholarly treatises.
Previous to the introduction of the Chinese ideographs in the early Christian centuries, the Japanese had no written language. A knowledge of these ideographs places all Chinese literature at the service of the Japanese scholar. There are over eighty thousand characters, and three ways of writing as well as of pronouncing [pg 230] each, but one finds that most people know only about five or six thousand. ”

“ While it would be an advantage to have preachers who could speak the Japanese language, still, it is more important that we should send our ablest divines there—men who can meet the most intelligent of the Japanese upon an equal footing and defend before them the Christian philosophy of life. ”

“ They in turn were separated from the business part of the village sometimes by a second or third moat. By life in castle and yashiki we mean the life of the daimiō, whether in city or country.
[34] The Japanese language is full of expressions showing different shades of meaning in the politeness or respect implied. There are words and expressions which superiors in rank use to inferiors, or vice versa, and others used among equals. Some phrases belong especially to the language of the high-born, just as there are common expressions of the people. ”

“ It is called a syllabary, you remember, because each sign stood in their language for a syllable. They had to do this, because, while Chinese is all short syllables, Japanese is a language of much longer words even than ours. They cut down and simplified the Chinese signs, giving them names of their own. In this way they manage to write very swiftly. And, while not so clumsy as the Chinese fashion, the Japanese method is clumsier than is the use of an alphabet. In late years, a society has been started in Japan to do away altogether with their old-time writing, and adopt our alphabet. ”