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Copyrighted © 1991-2008 by Randy R.
Johnson.
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You're visiting Randy Johnson's "Favorite Getaways in Rural Japan",
Copyrighted © 1991-2008 by Randy R.
Johnson.
I am not going to try and teach you to speak Japanese, but this
section attempts to give the reader an appreciation for the nature and
history of the written and spoken Japanese language. Unless you
are actually interested in learning Japanese -- or are a linguist --
this is probably pretty dry stuff.
History
When Chinese culture began to influence Japan (via Korea) around the 5th century AD, the Japanese had no written language, but of course they had a unique spoken language. The roots of the spoken Japanese language are not at all clear, even to the world's best linguists, and they cannot be traced with any certainty to other languages, although tenuous elements are found in a number of early languages stretching from Siberia to Malaysia!
Since there was no written Japanese system to convert to, the full body of written Chinese learning -- several millennia of the written knowledge of high Chinese culture, religion, and philosophy -- could only be assimilated by those who understood the native Chinese written language. And so the lingua franca of classical learning in Japan defaulted to the written Chinese script, much as Latin was the only written language of learning in a mediaeval Europe where Latin was already dead as a spoken language. In fact, most of the first scholars of Chinese culture in Japan were Koreans who understood only the written Chinese language, and were not particularly proficient in any of its spoken forms.
Because spoken Japanese is completely unrelated to and quite different from the Chinese language, the Chinese ideographic writing system was not easily adapted to Japanese language, and for centuries all writing and formal learning were carried out in pure Chinese. The higher culture of Chinese philosophy, education, and religions was imported, and long remained in the written Chinese language. Therefore, learning and literature were reserved to the higher educated classes, some of whom were of Korean or Chinese descent, imported to teach Chinese culture to the Japanese ruling class.
In the Chinese writing system, a character is much more like a picture and indeed historically evolved from simplified drawings. One character is a complex combination of from one to over twenty pen strokes that represents an object or an idea. For this reason, they are sometimes called ideograms. The idea also has a spoken Chinese word (or perhaps more than one word) associated with it, but the symbol does not properly represent a specific sound.
Indeed, in China today, the numerous Chinese 'dialects' are in fact mutually unintelligible spoken languages which use the same system of writing to represent quite different spoken words with more or less the same meanings. Chinese movies usually have Chinese subtitles, which can be read by the speakers of dozens of different Chinese 'dialects' who cannot understand a bit of the spoken dialog. Because the syntax and speech patterns of these dialects are somewhat similar, it is possible to directly translate the written form of one Chinese dialect into numerous other spoken dialects, although sometimes with considerable loss of continuity and connotation.
The spoken Japanese language, however -- not only its words and syllables, but also the syntax and grammar -- is about as different from Chinese languages (and English) as can be imagined. Japanese is a polysyllabic language without inflection, which relies on only about four dozen phonetic sounds, while Chinese is monosyllabic and rich with tonality as well as inflection. And Japanese syntax -- the ordering and relationship of words in sentences -- takes quite a while to become familiar with! For this reason, it has been termed extremely unfortunate that the Japanese did not earlier develop their own alphabet or phonetic script, instead of adopting the Chinese written ideography, which was quite unsuited to Japanese. The Koreans, by the way, facing a similar situation, in relatively recent times invented their own phonetic alphabet ("hongul") to replace the Chinese characters altogether.
'Kana'
Naturally, the Japanese did eventually find a need to represent their own language in writing, but they did so by using Chinese characters as phonetic symbols. The early attempts were ad hoc and used whatever similar-sounding Chinese character came to mind.
Eventually a regular system was developed, called the Manyo Kana. This name derives from its usage in one of the first works of literature in the Japanese language, the Manyoshu, a collection of ancient Japanese oral poems transcribed at the end of the 8th century using Chinese characters as 'phonetics', called kana. Still, this system was extremely cumbersome in light of the fact that it required several complex Chinese characters to represent a single polysyllabic Japanese word.
The Japanese love of poetry is attributed with providing the impetus to improve on this system by reducing the Manyo Kana to much simplified phonetic characters which were much easier to write. Each writer naturally developed abbreviated cursive forms of the more complex characters. This 'short-hand' script slowly evolved into the current Japanese syllabary of the 49 syllabic symbols called hiragana, which uses only one to four pen strokes for each syllable's written "letter". While each such symbol represents a spoken syllable -- as opposed to a phonetic 'letter' -- this system is much closer to an alphabet than the Chinese writing system.
Still, however, Chinese remained for centuries the language of written learning, government, commerce, and religion in Japan. The first great strides in truly Japanese literature were made by women. While there were women of power and influence at court, the learning and use of Chinese language was generally discouraged among them. Therefore, when women of culture ventured into literature, they did so in the Japanese language, using the "woman's writing" of the hiragana. At the beginning of the 11th century, Lady Murasaki Shikibu wrote and published an historical romance novel called Genji Monogatari (Tales of Genji), which is still regarded as one of the great works of Japanese (if not world) literature. You can find an English version in any good bookstore.
Not only were men reluctant to write in the "effeminate" form of their native language, but men of learning and power were too busy immersing themselves in the hand-me-down ideas of classical Chinese learning to explore the imaginative potentials of original literature in the language in which they best thought and could express their feelings. (I stole this insight, and much of the history of Japanese language from G. B. Sansom's "Japan, A Short Cultural History", 1931; widely available in paperback.)
The Characters -- 'Kanji'
As soon as the Japanese began to write in their own language, they discovered that it was a language rather poor in ideas compared to Chinese, which already had a three thousand year history of literature and written learning, including philosophy and religious thought. There were so many words and ideas already introduced into learning by the high Chinese culture, that even Lady Murasaki had regular need to call on Chinese words to express the fullness of her ideas.
This reflected the fact that Chinese words had already become commonplace in the spoken language of people of any learning and ideas. When the Japanese came across a new object or idea, they usually found a Chinese word that already described it. These foreign words flooded into the language in lieu of inventing new Japanese compounds. When it came to writing these Chinese words down, it was easier for people of learning to use the original Chinese characters, interspersed with the phonetic writing of the Japanese words. Through usage, many of these Chinese words were quickly adopted into the spoken Japanese language.
When new words were to be borrowed or invented, they found it easier
to enrich both their spoken and written language with compound words
using the shorter Chinese pronunciations. For example, the Chinese
character for 'new' represents the Japanese word atarashii, but
when used in combination with the character for 'word'
(kotoba), the characters take their 'Chinese' pronunciations to
form a new "Japanese" word shin-go
),
By the time Japanese had come into its own as a common form of written communication -- led by the profusion and popularity of Japanese poetry and literature (by men and women alike) -- Chinese characters also came to be used to represent many existing Japanese words with identical meanings to the original Chinese. In this case, the Chinese character was understood to represent a Japanese word, and was pronounced in Japanese. As more and more literate people became familiar with many of the common Chinese characters, they were used instead of phonetics to add richness to written Japanese words.
Modern Japanese
So by now we have a situation where a Chinese character may be used in several different ways. Each character has at least two or three sounds it can represent, and often more. The simplest situation is a character that has one Japanese pronunciation (kun-yomi) -- a Japanese word -- and a second pronunciation derived from the original Chinese pronunciation (on-yomi) of the character -- which is used when the character is combined with other characters to form a more complex Japanese compound word (such as shin-go, above).
Quite often a single character can be used to represent several different, but usually related, native Japanese words; a simple example of this is a noun and a related verb, such as a building and to build. In this case, the correct word and its pronunciation (and meaning) are determined by the context, and by the phonetic endings that may be appended to it. Some characters have several quite different 'Chinese' pronunciations, because they were re-introduced into Japan during different Chinese dynastic periods, when the official 'Chinese' language was Manchurian, Mandarin, or Mongolian.
Perhaps the most difficult part of learning this writing system is that there are a very limited number of different sounds to be made by the several thousand characters. There are few phonetic sounds (or syllables) that do not have at least ten or twenty characters that can represent that same sound, but with different meanings. My character dictionary shows 66 characters that can be pronounced 'ko' and another 188 (!) that can be pronounced 'koo' (with a doubled 'o' sound). Maybe that's why I never learned to read very well.
So you end up with numerous compound words which have exactly the same pronunciation, but totally unrelated meanings. For normal speech, the Japanese seem to get by amazingly well on context (or limited vocabulary), but they can often be seen 'drawing' characters into their hands to clarify a word's meaning. When they travel around Japan, however, they are as lost as any of us. Like many proper nouns, Japanese place names are made up of two or three characters, which usually have two to six possible pronunciations, including either Japanese or 'Chinese' readings. If you've never been there before, you have no idea how a town's name is really pronounced!
The real enigma are those places, and there are many of them, whose pronunciation is so archaic that the characters have no relationship whatsoever to any modern readings. One example is the large city of Kobe, which is made up of two characters, neither of which are ever normally pronounced 'ko', or 'be'. Many of the really ancient towns in Japan already had names when Chinese writing arrived, and they seem to have just chosen characters that looked nice to represent their names. Yamato, the ancient name of Japan, is written with two characters meaning 'Big Peace', that would usually be pronounced "Dai-Wa". But I digress.
Eventually, the written Japanese language became a combination of Chinese characters and Japanese phonetics, and the characters are now an integral part of the Japanese language. Although borrowed from Chinese, they are now rightly called Japanese characters (kanji) since many have been modified and simplified into uniquely Japanese forms, and a few are even unique inventions of the Japanese. So I'm now going to stop calling them Chinese characters and just call them characters or kanji. By the way, in recent memory the Chinese government instigated a simplified version of many of their characters; so while many Japanese characters are somewhat simplified from the original Chinese, they are still more complex than some of their new counterparts in modern China.
The Chinese language has upwards of five or six thousand characters, although clearly, many are rarely used. Within this century, written Japanese used as many as three thousand characters, with four or five thousand listed in character dictionaries and used in more serious writings.
However, when the written Japanese language was simplified in 1946, the number of characters that students had to learn was limited to about 1,850, called the Toyo Kanji. These are also the only characters that can be used in newspapers and everyday documents. There are 92 additional characters which are approved for common use only in proper names. The other couple of thousand characters went out of use in all documents and most modern literature, and were replaced by spelling out these words phonetically.
So that's how written Japanese became the virtual hodge-podge that it is today. It consists of several different kinds of written words, of which I distinguish four. First, are numerous purely Japanese words -- including grammatical parts of speech which are unique to Japanese syntax -- which are written entirely in Japanese phonetics (hiragana).
The preponderance are native Japanese words which are represented by characters, but take their original Japanese pronunciation. However, when a modifier is added or required -- such as giving tense to a verb or adding a suffix to a noun or adjective -- the character forms only the root of the word, and the modifiers are added in phonetics. For example, the single Japanese words for go, went, didn't go, can't go, if I don't go, etc., all begin with the character for 'to go' (iku), but phonetic sounds are appended to the end to form the correct meaning: iku, ita, ikanakata, ikenai, ikanakereba. As I mentioned above, some Japanese words which used to be represented by some of the characters which have gone out of use, are now written out entirely in phonetics.
Next are the compound words I mentioned at length above, formed by two or more characters, which take on their (shorter) 'Chinese' readings to form words which are still mostly uniquely Japanese. These are very common, especially when discussing anything that didn't exist five hundred or a thousand years ago. Such words that I have already used here include Shinkansen ("New Tokaido Line" = the 'bullet' train), jikan-hyo (timetable), and even minshuku and ryokan (lodgings). Even the modern name of the country, Nihon (Japan) is a compound that would be NichiMoto (origin of the sun) in its Japanese pronunciation. Sometimes you get longer compounds which include both Chinese and Japanese pronunciations of their characters.
Foreign Words
Finally, are the many foreign words which are used in modern Japanese speech. The Japanese have a parallel syllabary, called katakana, which is only used for words of (non-Chinese) foreign origin. It is similar to hiragana with exactly the same number of symbols, representing the same sounds; it just looks a bit different. This is how your name would be written out in Japanese, and it is used for the thousands of foreign words such as hotel, hamburger, necktie, television, and on and on.
Because of the limited number of phonetic sounds in Japanese, the resulting pronunciations of these foreign words are often far from the original. There are two similar but different pronunciations for hamburger, one meaning a hamburger (sandwich) and the other meaning a 'Hamburg steak', without the bun.
It is interesting to ponder the number of such words which did not exist in Japanese until introduced by foreigners, such as pan (Portuguese for bread), butter, fork, door, and beer.
There are a number of foreign words which are now commonly used for objects which already had Japanese names. Miruku (milk) has replaced the Japanese gyu-nyu. And compyuta is commonly used in place of the word the Japanese invented, denki kei-san-ki (electric calculating machine). Ranchi (lunch) is commonly used in place of the traditional chu-shoku, but it often specifically means 'the lunch special'. Baa is used for a western style bar, while nomi-ya is still used for a Japanese-style drinking house; likewise for restauran and ryori-ya. Camera (a photo camera) has replaced shashin-ki. As I mention below, the Japanese Railways used to be called the Koku-tetsu, but now is just called JR (jay-aru).
There are a number of words which have been borrowed from foreign languages, but have been greatly modified by the Japanese in pronunciation and meaning. Albeit (German for job) means a part-time job in Japanese; wai-shatsu ("white shirts") means a man's dress shirt of any color. Mansion in Japanese means a privately owned apartment or condominium, and yacht ('yotto') is any little boat with a sail. By the way, beer is biru, from the English, but beer garden, is biya-gaden, from the German.
Then there are many modernistic contractions of foreign words that we would never guess at. Maicon means a micro-computer; wapuro is a word processor; seku-hara is sexual harassment; kone means a connection, but only as in "I've got a connection at City Hall"; nega is a photo negative; and oh-eru ('OL') means 'office lady', a secretary. Chu-hai is a 'highball' made with Japanese sho-chu liquor. And karaoke, is a combination of the Japanese word kara meaning empty, and a contraction of the English word orchestra -- empty orchestra!
A few foreign words have been so integrated into the language that they are now written as Japanese words, and foreigners mistake them for native words. Many such, like tabako (for tobacco, or more commonly "cigarettes") were introduced in very early days, as was Tempura, which is the Portuguese word for egg batter, an old painting technique. Ton-katsu (breaded pork cutlet) is a combination of the Chinese pronunciation of pork ('ton') and the Japanization of the English word cutlet.
The two parallel Japanese syllabaries, hiragana and katakana, today consist of 49 simple symbols each and can be learned in a couple of weeks with a common workbook. Every Japanese and foreign word can be written in its correct pronunciation using these simple phonetics. In practice, most Japanese also uses plenty of complex Japanese characters.
However, if you're spending more than a few weeks in Japan, learning the two kana systems can take you a long way, especially in the city. For example, any western style (or pseudo-western style) eatery has its menu written almost entirely in kana. Most train platforms have the name of the station written in hiragana (for children) as well as in characters. Most sushi shops have the names of the fish written in hiragana, because most of the fish characters did not make the modern list of essential kanji. Once you learn the phonetics, you will be amazed at the number of signs you can read just walking around town; a few of them might even be useful.
Japanese Grammar
Some aspects of the Japanese language are extremely simple, while others are extremely complex. It has no gender (like Latin languages) or number -- hon means 'book' or 'books' -- so you must specify the number if you want to distinguish between singular and plural. Verbs are not conjugated by person, they remain the same for I, you, we, she, and they. There are only three tenses plus some gerunds ('playing'), but future tense is used sparingly; you usually just say 'tomorrow I go'.
These are the easy parts. What they do have are verb forms to indicate negatives and conditionals, plus active, passive, causative, and possible 'moods', and a subjunctive case. 'I can make you not be able to learn' is one long verb! Then there are the three levels of formality and three levels of politeness; they aren't all used all the time, but it can get pretty complicated.
For politeness, there are three different words for father, my father, and your father, plus an honorific word for speaking to your own father. There are separate words for house, my house, and your house. When you get to the top level of formality, there are completely different verbs for eating. Taberu means 'to eat', but the humble verb for 'I eat' is itadaku (ita-daki-mas), and the honorific verb for 'you eat' is meshiagaru. Similarly for the verbs to go, come, speak, and do. In addition, there is a whole dialect of extremely honorific verbs and nouns, called ke-go; it is only used by 'servants' -- which today includes waitresses, shop clerks, and receptionists, as well as maids. I never learned much of it, and it's pretty embarrassing when you call a company and you can't understand the woman on the telephone telling you that Mr. Kimura is away from his desk and will call you back later.
To make things more difficult, word order and syntax are quite different from English and Chinese. The verb comes at the end of the sentence and several Japanese-specific "particles" are used to specify the relationship between parts of speech. As only a simple example, what would be a question mark, or an exclamation mark in English is in Japanese a "particle" word. It can take several months for even a serious student of the language to become comfortable (= not completely disoriented) with Japanese syntax.
Japanese language schools and books teach 'neutral polite' Japanese. This is ordinary polite Japanese using 'normal' formality and it is used between strangers of more or less equal standing. You still have to learn the polite words for 'my humble stuff' versus 'your honorific stuff'. In formal situations, or for showing proper respect to those you should respect, you need to learn plenty of more formal and honorific speech.
My first big crisis was when I made Japanese friends who laughed at my formality, because I had never learned the informal speech that is used between friends. Verbs take different (more abrupt) endings in informal speech, and there are lots of informal verbs, nouns, and other syntax that are used in place of all the words you learned from the books. I can think of six words for 'I', three of which are informal. I can think of four or five words each for 'we', 'you', 'he', 'she', and 'they'. You only need to know one or two, but there's a long way to go from there, and you need to know when, and when not to use them all.
Masculine and Feminine Speech
In Japanese, there are speech patterns which are specifically used by one gender and not the other. In English we probably think of "man's words" as only being those perhaps too vulgar for proper women to use; but in Japan the speech of men and women are something like dialects. If you say "y'all", you sound like a Southerner; if you say "do sh'ta NO?", you sound like a woman -- men say "do sh'tan DA" ('what's the matter?').
There are probably more individual Japanese words that are "men's" words, many of which just sound too 'familiar' or 'informal' for women's speech. Women's speech tends to be more polite, while gruffness is considered a masculine 'virtue' in informal settings. Men say "boku" or "ore" for 'me', and "umai" for 'delicious'; women who use these words (and more are doing so) sound masculine, butch, or just independent, depending on your point of view. (The regular word for 'me' is "watashi" -- itself a contraction of the more formal "watakushi" -- and only women should use the feminine "atashi".) Men (often) end emphatic sentences with "yo", while women tend to use the softer "wa". ("Yo" and "wa" are the Japanese equivalents of the exclamation point.)
Even these 'dialects' vary over geographical regions; men around Kyoto often use "wa" (and are sniggered at by outsiders). "Ro" is generally considered a softer form of "yo", except in Tokyo, where it is characteristic of gruff male speech ("Baka da RO!"), and Tokyo women tend to use "yo" more often. But I digress.
You only need to worry about this when you really start speaking Japanese in sentences, as most gender-oriented speech displays itself in speech patterns, not in one-word orders at the sushi bar. But men will get away with asking for the "kanjo" (bill), or worse, the "benjo" ('crapper'), while women may be scrutinized (silently) for using such informal words.
The classic errors occur among male Westerners who have learned their Japanese from native female companions. They go into a bar and start talking like a girl! These 'dialects' are so ingrained that the Japanese themselves, if asked, cannot identify words as being specifically masculine or feminine, even though they obey the dialectic rules by subconscious habit. (Southerners don't consciously decide not to say 'you' instead of 'y'all'). So even if you ask your teacher if a certain word is a "man's word", she may have no idea, even though in practice she would never use it in her own speech.
Okay, I never said this was going to be easy. If you've stuck with me this far, then you must be really serious about Japanese language. So this is your introduction to the nature of learning Japanese.
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